Labyrinth
by Amicitia Revenant
Summary: After a pleasant weekend at the farmhouse and an uneventful drive home, all that's left is to walk the last few miles to the Lair. It should take an hour, tops. Of course, you have to allow extra time for Turtle Luck...
1. One

Disclaimer: I don't own any mutants, ninjas, or turtles, and I don't even have a teenager in the house anymore. So I quadruply don't own the TMNT. (Although, that's kind of a double-double-negative, so maybe I _do_ own them... *goes to check* Nope, still not mine.) I also don't own any of the things this story references. I can dispense Awesome Points to readers who spot the less obvious references, but the points aren't good for anything, so don't waste your time.

Warning: This fic contains a fair amount of swearing. Some of it is creative. Most of it is Raph. I tried to get him to clean up his language, but he called me a [insult excised]. I told him that names like that hurt my feelings, and he said that if I kept bothering him he would call me something worse, and this all seemed very counterproductive so I just dropped the subject.

And... that's all I have to say about this one! Enjoy the story!

**Labyrinth**

One

Leo wakes to someone shaking him.

"What?" he mumbles.

"We're here," Donatello informs him.

"What?" He moves his arms carefully, feeling the awkward corner he's wedged himself into. "Already?"

"Already nothing," Raphael says. "You've been sleeping since Hartford."

Memory returns. Casey had invited April and the four Turtles to spend a weekend at his farmhouse in Northampton. Splinter had been invited too, but had declined, citing his belief that, for the father of four rambunctious teenagers, staying at home while the teenagers were elsewhere was a far better vacation than travelling with them would be. Casey and his five guests had made the trip to Massachusetts on Friday, and headed back south late Sunday night. Leo last remembers sitting in the back of Casey's van as it rolled down I-91 in Connecticut. Now he is still sitting in the back of Casey's van, but it has come to a halt somewhere in Manhattan.

"I have not," Leo protests, rolling to his knees and standing up carefully in the low-ceilinged space.

"No, of course not," Don says placatingly. "Your head flops around like that when you're awake."

Leo leans against the wall for a minute, making sure all the pieces of his consciousness are back online before he goes staggering out into a public street. When his head feels clear, he moves to the open back door of the van, peers out, and drops lightly to the asphalt.

Mike is at the driver's door, hanging on the window. "Thanks for the weekend, dude and dudette," he's saying.

"No problem," Casey replies.

"So," Mike says, with his most ingratiating smile. "When can we come for another visit?"

"_Another_ visit?" April sounds horrified. "I need to recover from _this_ visit."

"What are you talking about?" Mike says. "We're great house-guests."

"That's an interesting choice of phrase," April tells him.

Mike grins.

"Time to go, Mikey," Don says. He has the manhole cover off and is halfway down the ladder.

"Yeah, I'm coming," Mike says. He turns back to the window. "'Bye, guys." He pushes off from the door and, in one artful flip, he's underground.

"Night, Case," Raph says. "Ape." He glances into the dark opening, and disappears.

"See you later," Leo says, and follows his brothers.

The metal disc scrapes back into place, and the van is alone in the dark street.

"You know," Casey says. "Sometime we could go up to my place _without_ the guys. For a weekend. It would be... romantic?"

"And what makes you think I'd be interested in a romantic weekend with _you_, Casey Jones?"

But her tone suggests that she'd be very interested indeed.

* * *

The spot where April and Casey have dropped them off is several miles from the Lair, maybe an hour on foot through the twisting tunnels under the city. The mutants make it a point not to use the manholes closest to their home, in case anyone is watching their comings and goings. As an extra precaution, the circle of access points they use most often is irregular and off-center, making it difficult for anyone to guess the actual location of their home. And if anyone tries to follow them, they have a chance to fight the tail, or ditch it, while they're still a safe distance from their front door.

Anyway, Leo reflects, they could all use a chance to stretch their legs, after being cooped up in the back of a van for 150 miles. As much as he loves his brothers, sitting in a five-foot-by-eight-foot space with them for three hours is really not his favorite way to spend an evening.

He turns homeward, and begins walking.

Mike bounces ahead of him, then walks on his toes for a few paces, stretching his legs quite literally while clasping his wrists at the utmost vertical limits of his arms. "Aaahh," he says, with a noisy exhalation. "Sweet smell of home."

They move in companionable silence for a quarter of an hour, tracing their way through the familiar passages.

"You know," Don says, over the rush of water at a runoff junction. Apparently it rained while they were away. "We should do something for them. To pay them back."

Raph, who is walking in front, turns around backwards to address his brothers. He knows the tunnels well enough that he doesn't need to see them, only needs to feel the distance he has travelled and turn when he has gone far enough. "You're right," he says. "We oughta invite them up to _our_ vacation place."

"But which one?" Mike asks, as though this is a serious dilemma. "Our mansion in the Hamptons, or our ski lodge in Vail?"

"Maybe we could take them camping," Leo suggests. "Raph, look out."

Raph whips around, and finds himself face-to-face with a brick wall that was certainly not there three days ago. "What the hell?"

"Huh." Don frowns at the fresh brickwork. "The city must be working on something."

"Well, never mind," Leo says. "We'll take the western approach."

They turn, all facing forward now, and continue along the alternate route to their home.

"We should check it out, though," Don says. "See what they're up to."

"Probably nothing good," Raph says. "They never build us anything convenient."

"That's not true," Mike reminds him. "They built us that awesome skate pipe."

"That was a subway extension," Don says, in the interest of factual accuracy.

"It was multi-purpose," Mike defends.

"Wait," Leo says, and they all stop instantly. "Something is wrong." He peers around the shadowy tunnel.

Raph reaches for his sai, and glares up and down the passage.

"The water isn't running," Don says.

They look down. Stormwater from the weekend's rain has been splashing around their ankles as they walked, but now that they're not moving, they realize that the water isn't either. There's no current.

"It should be draining," Don says. He raises his arm slowly, pointing in the direction they were headed. "That way."

"Light," Leo says, and Don fumbles for the small flashlight he keeps in his belt.

Leo flicks it on, and aims the narrow beam down the tunnel.

What little there is of it.

"What the _hell?_" Raph says again.

Where there should be a branch, there is simply a dead end.

"The city doesn't build _anything_ that fast." Raph moves forward to run his hands over the weakly-illuminated wall. "What's the deal?"

Don joins him, waving Leo closer, examining the new-looking bricks and the smooth mortar. "I don't know," he says finally.

"Useful," Raph mutters.

"Okay." Leo clicks off the light. "We'll go topside for a few blocks, get around this, come down on the other side."

Mike looks nervous. "Do you think -"

Leo shakes his head. "Master Splinter would have called if there was trouble near the Lair. He would have told us not to come back."

Mike's voice shrinks another size. "But what if -"

"_No_," Leo says firmly. He passes the flashlight back to Don. "Let's go."

They head back the way they came, moving now with the silence of ninjas, and not merely the silence of co-travellers who are busy with their own thoughts.

The nearest manhole cover is only a few hundred yards back. Raph climbs the ladder and pushes against the disc.

Then he pushes harder.

"Won't move," he grunts, unnecessarily.

Mike squeezes up the narrow rungs beside his brother, and adds his lifting power to the effort. Their combined strength still can't budge the metal cover.

"Must be somethin' on it," Raph says. He jumps down from the ladder. "We'll try the next one."

The next manhole yields the same result, and so does the one after that.

"Gimme a break," Raph grumbles, as he climbs down from the third ladder. "_Everybody's_ gotta park their damn car on the covers?"

"I'm calling Master Splinter," Don says. He pulls out his shell-cell, flips it open, and dials. In the silence of the sewer tunnels, they all hear the phone ring, ring again, and then buzz the flat note of a dial tone.

Don lowers the phone, frowns, and dials again.

_Ring. _

_Ring. _

_Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep._

Don closes the phone. "I'm calling April," he announces, as though this had been his plan all along. He flips the cell open again, dials, and listens.

They all hear it ring once, twice. Then the phone emits a burst of static so loud that all of them wince as Don jerks the device from his ear and jabs at the button to turn it off. "Okay," he says shakily, as the harsh echoes die away. "Who has a Plan C?"

"Plan _C?_" Mike squeaks. "We're up to Plan _C_ already? Nothing good ever happens on Plan C!"

"Everybody chill out," Raph snaps. He points to a side tunnel they've passed twice already. "I'm going that way. I'll see what _hasn't_ been blocked up by this freakin' fast-forward construction project, I'll find a way home, and I'll come back for you guys." He turns and takes a step.

"Raph, wait." Leo's tone is commanding. "Let's stick together."

Raph crosses his arms. "You guys always get lost in new tunnels. You'll only slow me down and mess me up."

"He's got a point," Don says.

Leo thinks. Raph _does_ have an uncanny sense of direction, a seemingly endless ability to go in circles and come out still knowing where North is. Moreover, he can always retrace his steps exactly. Refinding his starting point after an expedition through rearranged sewer tunnels won't be a problem. Keeping track of which passages he's already explored while three hopelessly lost brothers mill around in confusion could be.

Leo decides he'd rather saddle Raph with potential handicaps than send him off alone. "We should stay together," he says.

"Why?" Raph demands. "Nobody's down here, Leo! It's just some damn stupid construction project that's gettin' in our way and messin' up our phones. Look." He puts his shoulder forward, an aggressive pose, and points his finger. "Not all of us slept in the van. Mike and Don don't want to go traipsing all around trying to -"

"Wait a minute," Don interrupts. "Don't use _me_ as an excuse."

Raph's eyes flick back to Leo.

Leo sets his jaw.

"_I'm_ not ashamed to admit I'm tired," Mike says, into the tense silence.

Raph's smile of vindication comes a fraction too soon for Leo's liking, but he relents anyway. "Fine. We'll wait here."

"I won't be too long," Raph says. He turns and moves off down the tunnel, the water parting smoothly around his ankles.

Mike leans against a curved wall. "See?" he says. "This is why I always say you shouldn't leave home."

Don takes up a position against the opposite wall. "You've never said that before in your life."

Mike shrugs, dismissing the objection as irrelevant. "I'm starting now."

"I'm fairly certain," Don says, "that less than an hour ago you expressed an interest in going to Massachusetts again."

"Sometimes my opinions change very quickly," Mike replies airily.

Don raises a brow. "There are some who would call you... fickle."

"Who are these people?" Mike demands. He raises a fist. "I'll kick their butts!" His hand falls back, his open palm slapping lightly against the wall. "On second thought, I don't care."

Don rolls his eyes. "Leo, quit glaring at the pipes."

Leo quickly looks away from the dull metal tubes that carry the city's clean water supply. "Raph is right," he says. "No - Raph is half-right."

"See?" Mike directs his comment at Don. "Other people change their minds too."

"If mind-changing were a sport," Don replies, "you would be the world champion."

"Of course," Mike says. "Is there any sport I'm _not_ the world champion of?"

Don studies his younger brother for a long moment. Then, with a completely straight face, he says: "Shuffleboard."

"_Duh_," Mike says, as though he can't believe Don would even bring up the point. "Anyone who plays shuffleboard is a loser, and the world champion of shuffleboard is the biggest loser of them all." He turns back to Leo. "What is Raph half-right about?"

"That there's no one down here." Leo's mouth twists as he reconsiders what question he's actually answering. "Well, no, that's the part he was completely right about. But the part he was completely wrong about, was that he should be the only one who looks for a way home."

Mike turns to Don again. "Are you familiar with this definition of 'half'?"

"Of course," Don replies. "This is the definition of 'half' that applies when you're talking about 200% of your apples and oranges."

Mike's eyes widen. "Leo is mixing apples and oranges?"

"It's very sad." Don shakes his head. "Soon he'll be counting his chickens before they hatch."

"Ha, ha," Leo deadpans. "I'm going to check out the lower levels. If I hit a dead end, I'll come back. If I don't, then... I'll come back, but not as quickly."

"Have fun," Don says, as Leo walks off. He adjusts his position to fit his shell more comfortably against the curve of the wall, and admits, at least to himself, that he _is_ tired.

"What do you think they're building?" Mike asks.

Don considers. Construction proceeding at a breakneck pace, changes to the water flow pattern, potentially sealed-off access points...

"I think it's a clean-up," he says. "I bet they found some kind of hazardous material, and they're blocking things up before it gets into the water supply, or before somebody accidentally gets into _it_."

"Aw, great." Mike kicks at the water. "Are we gonna have new mutant neighbors now?"

"I hope not," Don sighs.

They lapse back into the silence of their own thoughts. Don turns things over in his head, wondering what might have spilled, wondering whether the public knows about it, wondering what the sewers, his home territory, will look like when the city is done with them.

_Sealed-off access points..._

"You know..." he says slowly. "There's at least _one_ manhole cover that we know isn't sealed..."

Mike looks up, and there's a flicker in his eyes as he starts thinking what his brother is thinking.


	2. Two

Two

Raphael moves down the passage.

It isn't one that he uses often, but everything about it is familiar to him.

So far, anyway.

Places stick in his mind, imprint themselves on his neurons, even if he has only seen them once. He remembers every inch of this tunnel, for miles, up to the farthest point of it that he's ever explored. He knows that if he walks it far enough, there will be a side tunnel, and another, and another, and eventually, after many forks and many inconvenient turns that he has no choice but to follow, he will find himself at home.

If all those turns and tunnels are where he expects them to be, then he will be wasting a lot of time and energy walking the route in triplicate: going, coming back, going again with his brothers. But if city planning has come up with some bright new ideas for these tunnels as well, it could take him a long time, and many errors, to figure out a workaround.

In which case, he is saving his brothers the trouble of tracing their steps in and out of passages that suddenly don't lead where they used to. And so, in a perverse way, Raphael hopes that the construction workers have made a big mess of everything.

He likes being the hero.

And so far, he is being disappointed.

Places trigger memories for him, calling up visions of the things that happened there. He was in this tunnel... a year and a half ago, give or take, with his brothers, and they were... sitting?

_He was sitting on a narrow shelf, one of a pair that framed the runoff channel. His knees were pulled to his chest, his toes dangling off the edge of the concrete, above the dancing water. One hand was lying protectively on the rough canvas of a lumpy knapsack. The other was resting on Mike's chest, at the end of an arm snaked around his brother's shoulders. _

_"This sucks," Raph said. Opposite him, Leo nodded wearily._

The film of his memory skips, the previous scene missing. _What place, before this one?_

He worries his lip with his teeth as he walks, trying to remember. Gradually, shape and color bleed into the cellulose of his mind.

_They had been at a grocery store, a favorite scavenge spot, lurking on the roof above the dumpsters. A boxboy was standing below them, in the fenced-off corner of the back lot, extending his taking-out-the-garbage assignment into an unofficial break, an opportunity to smoke a slow cigarette. _

_Raph had shut his nostrils against the stench, figuring - rightly, it turned out - that he could hold his breath longer than this no-account kid could nurse the smoldering red coal of his Marlboro. _

_It wasn't much of a contest. The kid hadn't even known he was playing. But Raph had taken pleasure in the victory anyway._

Raph pauses, both his steps and the video playing on the screen of his mind. The construction workers _have_ been here. A side tunnel is gated now by the same fresh brickwork he saw earlier.

This turnoff is only useful if he wants to go home by an extremely long and circuitous route; he hadn't been planning on trying it. Not, at least, until he had exhausted more efficient options. Still, the fact that it's closed to him rankles, makes him feel caged in.

He snarls impotently at the bricks. They don't respond.

He walks on.

_Later. They'd taken what they wanted, what they could carry, from the dumpster's ever-replenishing supply of not-quite-spoiled food. They were heading home - to the small, narrow place they called home then, before the Mousers came. _

_They were only a few minutes from their front door. Then, unfamiliar voices. Leo signaled them to stillness, slid his knapsack noiselessly to the ground, and slipped ahead to scout the situation. In a moment he was back. _

_"Sewer workers," he told them, on the merest whisper of breath. _

_"At this hour?" Raph whispered back. _

_Leo picked up his bag and beckoned them forward. Or backwards, rather, back the way they had come. He led them down winding passages, not ones they usually took, away from the Lair. Automatically, Raph remembered the way, drawing it in a new glowing line on his mental map. _

_They walked for twenty minutes, deep into the catacombs of the sewers. Raph began to wonder how many sewer workers there were, and how heavily they were armed. _

_Leo set his bag down, finally, and motioned his brothers to do the same. "They took the whole road apart," he said, barely louder than before. He gestured upwards. "Ceiling's gone." _

_"That'll mess up traffic," Mike said. _

_"That's why they're doing it at night," Don said. "They can't take too long about it, though." _

_"Longer than I feel like waiting." Raph reached for his bag. "Let's go around." _

_Leo shook his head. "They're too close to the Lair." _

_"So whaddya wanna do? Stay out here all night?" _

_That turned out to be exactly what Leo wanted to do._

Memory fades back to present. The setting is the same, the characters and plot different. Or, maybe, not so different.

A few more minutes brings Raph to the place they had camped that night. There's nothing to mark the place, never was, but still he knows it. The film plays again, sharper.

_"The perishables," Don said sadly, looking at his own knapsack. _

_"There's nothing we can do," Leo said. _

_"Yeah there is," Mike said. _

_A minute later they were eating ice cream with their fingers. It melted in the carton, in their hands, dripped in sticky pools on their legs and on the ground. It was good, and it mitigated the loss of the meat, the cheese, the yogurt. _

_"The cheese looked sketchy anyway," Mike said. _

_They washed away the evidence of their binge with water from the drainage channel. Leo took the rest of the perishables, walked some distance up the tunnel, went topside just long enough to ditch them in another garbage can. Then he came back, and they huddled together on the chilly concrete. _

_It was late fall, and the temperature was too low to be comfortable for mutant turtles, not low enough to preserve perishables for very long. _

_"On s-s-second thought," Mike stuttered, curling closer into Raph's encircling arm, "maybe the ice c-cream wasn't such a good idea."_

Mike had come out of that one with a nasty cold.

_Which he milked for three weeks, the manipulative little whiner._

The film ends.

Raph walks on.

* * *

Leonardo pays careful attention as he walks, looking for anything that has changed, anything that is not as it should be.

He sees nothing out of the ordinary. He arrives at the ventilation shaft without incident, and peers down into the deeper gloom of the lower levels. Below the shallow sewers where he has spent most of his life is another, older layer of drainage channels. The shaft he is now standing at the top end of was built between the two levels for reasons not entirely clear to him. Something to do with preventing the build-up of deadly gases, he thinks. Or, really, he tries _not_ to think.

Conventional wisdom has it that Manhattan is sinking, but Leo suspects that the city is actually rising, as successive generations of humans build structures of their own on top of the landscape of their forebears.

_Isn't that what archaeologists always find, when they dig up old cities?_

Perhaps a city does not need to be destroyed, before a new one can grow from its ashes.

Leo lowers himself into the shaft, and inches spider-wise down the narrow cylinder.

When he reaches the bottom, and looks around, he's struck by the same thought he has every time he comes down here, the same thought he forgets every time he returns to the comparative light and dryness of the upper levels.

_Why don't I come here more often?_

The older parts of the sewer are, frankly, beautiful. There's a craftsmanship in them, a lovingness to the masonry, that Leo is pretty sure qualifies as architecture. He saw a documentary on TV once, about how some of the sewers in Paris actually rank as a tourist attraction.

Standing in the gloom of century-old New York sewers, Leo thinks that he would put his basement against Europe's finest public sanitation systems any day of the week.

On the other hand, it's kind of nice to have this all to himself.

He breathes in, and the air doesn't seem particularly poisonous.

He moves along the damp passage, trailing his hand over the stonework of the walls, the columns and carvings of his own personal cathedral. He'll be surprised, and a little affronted, if the construction workers have come here, defacing this underground monument with their blank, characterless bricks.

He hasn't gone far before his path is blocked.

Not by bricks, but by stone. Something - it's hard to tell what, in this tenebrous underworld - has collapsed, sealing off the passage beyond.

_Maybe that's why everything is bricked over,_ Leo thinks. _Maybe the upper tunnels collapsed too, and they're shoring things up in a hurry._

He wishes that he had held onto Donatello's flashlight. Now, the only way to get a sense of the rockfall is to climb on it.

He hoists himself onto the first piece of rubble, and begins picking his way up the massive jumble. The carefully sculpted lines and curves, that used to fit together perfectly, make excellent handholds, despite the fact that they now look like a kaleidoscope, like Picasso's first foray into sculpture.

He feels small, on these huge fragments of wall and ceiling, but his hands and feet are sure and his fear of heights is shrunken and sleeping in the back of his mind. He scales the uneven pile steadily, looking for a way over or through, but it quickly becomes clear that he cannot pass. Some of the pieces are surprisingly large, and he and his brothers together would not be able to shift enough of them to squeeze through to the tunnel beyond.

He clambers back down, and tries the other direction.

* * *

"Wait," Mike says, as Don pushes off from his wall. "They won't know where we went."

"Good point." Don's thumbs search through the pouches of his belt. "Do you have some paper?"

"Uh." Mike fishes in his belt, and comes up with a scrap of paper and a stub of pencil.

Don glances at what's already on the scrap, then looks again. It appears to be a cartoon of Mike giving swordsmanship advice to a perplexed Leo. "'Pointy end towards enemy'?" he reads.

"Yeah, Leo didn't think it was funny either." Mike shakes his head, indicating his opinion of Leo's sense of humor. "Just write on the back."

Don scribbles a note on the reverse of the cartoon, then wedges the piece of paper between some pipes. "Hope they can see it," he says, stepping back and surveying the fragment of white in the dim greyness of the tunnel.

"If they don't," Mike says, "they should figure out to go back there anyway."

"All right," Don says. "Let's go."

They work backwards through the sewers, past the overflowing runoff junction, towards the random intersection Casey and April had left them at. It takes them only twenty minutes to find the place where they started. Mike climbs the ladder and presses hopefully against the cover.

Don can't decide whether or not he's surprised, when the disc doesn't move.

"Another car?" Mike asks, to avoid contemplating the alternatives.

"I doubt it," Don says grimly. He's definitely not surprised when his brother's face falls. "Something's not right."

Mike comes down from the ladder, and sweeps the tunnel with his eyes. "This _is_ the right place?"

"I'm not sure," Don admits. He looks up through the storm drain, but he hadn't been paying that much attention when they got out of the van, and he can't be sure whether this is the same corner. "I think... I think we should have stayed together."

Mike looks at him guiltily.

"Let's go back," Don says. "Let's go to where Raph and Leo left us, and wait there."

Mike follows close on Don's heels as they walk. "This is weird," he says, his nervousness spilling from him in words, in a desperate plea for comfort. "Am I the only one who thinks this is weird?"

"This is weird," Don confirms.

"I hate weird stuff," Mike goes on, picking at his brother verbally, seeking a response. "Why does weird stuff always happen to us?"

"I don't know," Don sighs.

"Do you think Leo and Raph are okay?" Mike stumbles over Don's feet, catches himself on his brother's shell.

"I don't know," Don says again. "Stop stepping on me."

"Sorry." Mike backs off a pace, then hops forward to catch up again. "Are we going to get home tonight? I hate -"

"Mike, can you be quiet for two seconds?" Don tries to keep the snap out of his voice, but he knows he's failed because he can feel Mike's hurt at his impatient tone. He tries again, more gently. "I'm trying to pay attention, so we don't get lost."

"Okay," Mike mumbles.

They walk on, in the strained silence of travellers who have nothing to say to each other.

"Sorry, Mikey," Don says after a while. "I just really don't want to get lost."

Mike doesn't answer.

"Mike?"

Still no answer.

Don stops and turns. The tunnel behind him is empty.

"Mike?" he says, into the echoing silence.


	3. Three

Three

As he stares down his third brick wall of the evening, Raph has mixed emotions.

For starters, he's glad that his direction-finding services will turn out to be needed, that he hasn't come all this way just to discover that the route is open, and that they all should have stuck together in the first place. (He hates it when Leo is right.) At the same time, he's angry that some stranger has come uninvited into his home, and thrown up an inconvenient barrier across his hallway. And, to round out the sampler course of feelings, he has a sneaking suspicion that he is going to see a lot more brick walls tonight, in places where he would rather not see them, and he is resigned to spending a lot of time working through the tunnels, searching for a way home.

"Fuck you," he says to the wall, and the wall's cowed silence makes him feel a little better.

He stands there, basking in his verbal victory, sorting out what to do next. His first-choice route is blocked. If he goes much further along the tunnel he has been following, he will quickly find himself in unfamiliar territory. If he goes back, there were several turnoffs that will lead him home by long, roundabout routes, turnoffs that he knows are not blocked.

That is, unless they are blocked further up.

He decides to try them. In the interest of not traversing the same ground more times than he has to, he will try them in the order he comes to them, following each side tunnel methodically, until it either ends or deposits him in the place he is trying to reach. All he has to do is keep track of which passages he has or has not explored.

Easy.

With one last menacing glare at the wall, Raphael turns back.

The wall, frozen with fear, remains where it is.

_They'd agreed to a watch rotation, that cold night in the sewers, but everyone was too edgy and uncomfortable to sleep yet. _

_"Master Splinter'll be goin' nuts," Raph commented, a weak attempt at making them feel better by pointing out that other people weren't doing so great either. _

_"Oh!" Don searched through the pouches of his belt, and pulled out his -_

What had he called them then?

_- his turtle-com, that newfangled doodad he'd worked up in his spare time. Later it would turn out to be the precursor to the shell-cell, but that first prototype was more like a walkie-talkie, an early attempt at copying the portable telephone. He only had two of them, then - the one that was in his hand, and the one that was somewhere in the Lair. _

_Don fiddled with the switches and dials, trying to get reception, or whatever. Then he held down the big yellow button with his thumb. "Hello? Master Splinter?" _

_A thin hiss of static. _

_Don readjusted the controls, and tried again. "Master Splinter, are you there?" _

_If he was, he was having no luck with responding. _

_"Sorry, guys." Don moved to put the com away, but Leo held out his hand for it. Don gave it to him, and he tucked it under the strap of his sword belt, where it would be easier to reach if Master Splinter tried to contact them. _

_The device remained silent all night. _

_Raph had last watch, in the morning, when his brothers had finally all fallen asleep, so he was first to hear the soft approaching footsteps. _

_He was on his feet in an instant, his weapons in his hands, but something told him not to use them. He stood over his brothers, and waited. _

_The person around the corner of the tunnel paused too, then emerged. _

_"Master Splinter!" Raph hurriedly sheathed his sai, and toed his brothers into wakefulness. "Guys, get up!" _

_"Master Splinter!" Mike said thickly, through a nose already filling with snot. _

_"Are you safe?" Splinter asked, going over each of them with his eyes. _

_"We're okay, Sensei," Leo reported. "There were these men working near the Lair..." _

_"I know." Master Splinter produced the second turtle-com from a fold of his robe. "I tried to warn you, but -" He offered the device to Donatello. "I do not think it is working. The men are gone now," he added. _

_They shouldered their packs, and went home. _

_Later, Donatello had given Master Splinter some serious lessons on the uses and operation of the turtle-coms._

Similar lessons had been given, to little avail, after the advent of the shell-cell.

Not that it mattered now.

Raph flicks his thumb over the useless lump in his belt, and keeps walking.

* * *

Mike blinks at the deserted tunnel. "Donnie?" he says, in a small voice.

He'd been following his brother, keeping his mouth shut and his eyes focused on Donatello's back.

Then he'd blinked, and Don was gone.

He keeps blinking, hoping Don will come back, but it isn't working.

"Donnie?" he says again. "This isn't funny, Donnie..." He rotates slowly, looking around. "Okay, maybe the cartoon wasn't that funny... but this, seriously, is _not funny_."

He waits, but there's no answering laugh, no brother popping out of a hiding place, either with or without an obnoxious shout of "BOO!"

"Okay." Mike breathes in and out a few times. "Okay. In a sewer, alone, can't get out, can't go home. Just like a video game, right? Yeah. Just like a dungeon. I've beaten loads of dungeons." He looks around, twitchily. "_Loads_ of dungeons. No big deal." He laughs nervously. "Yeah. No big deal. Just, like... what would Link do?" He looks around again. "Light some torches, or something."

It is abundantly clear that there are no torches in this sewer tunnel.

"Where's a dungeon map when you need one?" Mike mutters.

On the plus side, there don't seem to be any enemies here. There's no time limit, nothing shooting laser beams at him, and no spikes popping out of the floor.

In fact, it's not very much like a video game at all. It's just a sewer, and he's lost and alone in it.

_So what are you gonna do about it?_

He's going to go back to where he started. He's going to go back to where Leo left him, to where he should have stayed in the first place.

Donnie and his dumb ideas. They should have waited for Raph and Leo to come back, and _then_ gone back to the first manhole.

_Where did Donnie go, anyway?_

Don has a habit of disappearing, of chasing off after shiny things and wild ideas, of getting caught up in a thought and forgetting to tell anybody where he's going. But Mike can't imagine what Don could have found so distracting down here, and he can't figure out how Don had zigged quickly enough to escape Mike's own sharp gaze.

Because he had totally, _totally_ been paying attention.

And he totally remembers which way they had been walking.

"Yeah," he mumbles, and starts off in the direction that he is mostly, totally sure is the right one.

_Southbound through Connecticut. Leo was already asleep, Raph was absorbed in listening to the Yankee game, and Don and Mike had been left to devise their own entertainment. _

_"Okay," Mike said. "I've got one." _

_Don shifted April's duffel bag aside, and rearranged his legs. "I'm ready." _

_"You're at the South Pole," Mike began. _

_"That seems unlikely," Don said, with one of his little smiles, "but all right." _

_"You're at the South Pole," Mike repeated. "You live there in a one-story house. The outside of the house is green. The inside of the house is green. The front door is -" _

_"Green," Don said. "And there are no stairs, and all the windows face north." _

_"Yeah, well, I wasn't gonna ask that," Mike said, scrambling quickly for what he _was_ going to ask. "You look out one of your north windows and see a bear. What color is the bear?" _

_"That's the North Pole riddle," Don told him. "There are no bears at the South Pole." _

_"So what color is it?" Mike demanded. _

_"It's a ridiculous question," Don said. _

_"It's a _riddle_," Mike reminded him. "That's the point. Now, what color is the bear?" _

_"I have no idea," Don admitted. _

_"It's plaid," Mike said triumphantly. _

_Don gave him a look like he had lost his mind, and Raph did too, from his position behind April's seat. Leo's head lolled loosely as Casey changed lanes. _

_"It's a plaid bear," Mike repeated, pretty proud of himself for coming up with this on such short notice. "You're hallucinating, because it's the South Pole and you're, like, thirty seconds from freezing to death." _

_Raph snorted and went back to listening to his game. _

_"All right, smartypants," Don said. "My turn." He cleared his throat and contemplated the roof of the van for a moment. "You're walking down a road and you come to a fork. At the fork are two people. One of them always tells the truth and the other -" _

_"Gimme a break," Mike interrupted. "I've heard that one a million times." _

_"This one is different," Don said patiently, and resumed his story. "One of them always tells the truth and the other always tells lies. You want to know which way you should go, but you don't know where any of the roads lead." _

_"I ask one of them which way the other one would say I should go," Mike said, in the flat tone of extreme boredom. _

_Don smiled one of his smiles that meant he thought he had outsmarted someone. "Neither of them will answer any questions about what the other one would say." _

_"_What?_" Mike protested. "That's _always_ the solution!" _

_Don crossed his arms in satisfaction, and waited. _

_"All right," Mike said, after thinking furiously for a minute. "I ask one of the people what two plus two is. Then I know which of them tells the truth, and then I ask _him_ which way I should go." _

_"You can only ask one question," Don informed him. _

_"You're a sadist," Mike replied. _

_"I know." _

_Don posed the question somewhere around Meriden, and let Mike stew on it all the way to the bottom of 91, before suddenly querying him about the desirability of personal flying contraptions. _

_"What, like, for us to have?" Mike asked. _

_Don nodded. _

_"Are you joking?" _

_Don shook his head. _

_"I love you." _

_Don smiled one of his smiles that meant that he was going to do a lot of hard work, and it was going to be worth it._

"So what the hell am I supposed to ask?" Mike says out loud.

No one answers.

* * *

Don frowns, trying to figure out where Mike has gone.

Then he realizes, _he's_ the one who's gone.

This is not the tunnel he was in a minute ago.

This seems to violate the laws of time and space, and he finds it puzzling and irritating.

Not that he hasn't violated natural laws before (he's probably breaking a lot of them just by existing), but he can't help feeling a little nervous every time he crosses into that space where Newton, Einstein, and Euclid aren't towering over him, standing on the shoulders of the giants that keep the crushing weight of chaos and entropy at bay.

Chaos and entropy are among his least favorite things, along with lima beans, toe lint, and the certain knowledge that somebody has messed with his tools and then put them back in exactly the same place, in the ridiculous hope that he won't notice the aura of defilement that lingers around his workspace.

He _always_ notices. It's like he has a sixth sense, that picks up disturbances in the magnetic fields, intrusions of polarities not his own. But certain Turtles, for example, the ones who might be pseudonymically called "Shmaphael" and "Shmichelangelo", keep thinking they can get away with it.

And, to a certain way of thinking, they _do_ get away with it. A calm "Please stay out of my lab" and an occasional refusal to immediately fix broken video game systems and wrecked motorcycles does not seem to make any impression on them whatsoever.

Maybe he should learn to be meaner.

Or maybe he should return to solving the problem of where he is, and how to get back to where he _should_ be.

The difficulty with sewer tunnels is that they all look pretty much alike. The people who planned and built them, while they may have had a brilliant talent for designing systems to efficiently channel and move wastewater, were unfortunately devoid of imagination. There are a few distinctive places. Other than that, the key to knowing where you are, when you're underground, is to keep track of where you've been, the pattern of progression from point A to point B.

Which fails utterly when you suddenly find yourself dumped in a completely different place from where you were a minute ago.

The place Donatello now finds himself in is a five-way junction, with nothing to mark either the hub or any of the spokes. Is it the junction near the east end of Chinatown? Is it the junction at 59th Street? Is it a junction uptown, that he's never crossed through before?

Which way is North?

Sometimes, he wishes he really _did_ have a magnetic sense.

The water is flowing here, coming in from four of the tunnels and exiting through the fifth. If he follows the current, it will probably lead him to the edge of the island, to a place where he can look out and see where he is.

He really hopes the current is flowing crosswise, and not along Manhattan's long axis, but he seriously doubts that his luck will run that way. From many years living in the sewers, looking at maps of them, moving through the three-dimensional reality of them, he has learned that systems designed for the efficient transport of water do not always allow for the efficient transport of Turtles.

He starts walking.


	4. Four

Four

As Raph walks, he thinks about how quickly his circumstances have changed.

_He had woken up that morning to a warm beam of sunlight. He was lying on a surprisingly comfortable cot in the attic of Casey's farmhouse. Mike and Don were in identical cots opposite him, their side of the room not yet illuminated by the angle of the sun. Leo's cot, predictably, was empty. _

_He rose, not bothering to fix the sheets. Later they would fold up the metal bedsteads, packing them away for the next visit. _

_He found Leo in the kitchen, drinking a glass of water and looking contemplatively out the window of the back door. _

_"Good morning," Leo said, in the calm, contented tone that only came to him after a serious self-improvement session. _

_"You did katas," Raph accused him. _

_Leo agreed, with an incline of his head, but it was obvious he didn't feel guilty about his crime. _

_"Someday," Raph told him, "I will explain to you the meaning of 'vacation'." _

_"I look forward to learning it," Leo replied._

Raph stops. Just around the next corner, the tunnel should branch. He will try the right tunnel first, for the sake of a logical search pattern, even though he thinks the left tunnel - if unblocked - leads home by a more direct route.

He turns the corner.

The tunnel is blocked.

Not the right tunnel. Not the left tunnel. The tunnel he's in now, _before_ the split.

"What the hell?" he demands, of the looming wall.

This brickwork doesn't fit neatly inside the lip of a tunnel opening. It's just big and square and forbidding, filling the whole passage, denying access to what lies beyond. He has the sense, suddenly, that someone is deliberately preventing him from getting home.

Raph's fingers itch for his weapons, but there's nothing to attack.

He retreats.

A year and a half ago, when they spent that miserable night in the tunnels, they had no human friends, no place to go that wasn't on the shadowy underside of the city. Now, even though he does have friends, have refuges on the surface, he can't reach them.

Just to be sure, he tries the next manhole cover he comes to.

It won't move.

He's not surprised.

_How quickly I've fallen._

He heads back.

_Don and Mike had woken, later, and Casey and April, and they'd all had breakfast together in the sunny farmhouse kitchen. Leo had not said a single word about training, which proved that he had at least read the dictionary entry for 'vacation', even if he didn't yet understand how it applied to himself. _

_Later, Raph and his brothers went out, in broad daylight, to hike around Casey's property. They stayed out for hours. Sometime in the afternoon, they climbed a rise overlooking the neighboring farm. _

_"Look at those cows," Mike said, pointing down at the black-and-white forms standing quietly in the grass. "Hi, cows." _

_"_Smell_ those cows," Don said, fanning the air as if he could wipe away the area's perpetual stink of bovine. "P.U." _

_"Could be worse," Mike pointed out. "Casey's grandma could have lived next to the buffalo farm." _

_They all cringed, remembering the awful stench they passed through every time they drove to Northampton. _

_"Maybe we should go over there," Leo suggested, pointing in some vague direction away from the cows. _

_"Bye, cows," Mike said, as they headed down the slope._

Raph turns into the main tunnel, and continues back along his earlier route. The next turnoff is on the opposite side, and has a fairly major junction not far along.

_In the evening, they'd had a barbecue. The smoke from the grill curled up, tinting everything burger-scented, as the late summer sun sank below the Massachusetts hills. _

_"No," Don groaned, pushing away the plate Casey tried to offer him. "Mercy. No more." _

_"Ha!" Casey threw his arms up triumphantly, almost launching the refused burger. "Grillmaster Casey wins again!" _

_"Nuh-uh." Raph half-rose from his seat to snag the upraised plate. "Teams, Case. All of us against you. And I ain't done yet." He sat again and took a defiantly large bite of the burger. _

_Casey smirked. There were still six burgers on the grill, and only he knew how many more in the freezer._

None of the tunnels at the junction are blocked. Raph begins with the one on the right.

_Ultimately, Team Everybody-But-Casey had lost. Raph had managed to eat five burgers, boosting his side to a total of seventeen, but Casey's supply of frozen patties, and his will to grill them, had proved insurmountable. _

_Interestingly, the sudden appearance of a tray of brownies had revived everyone's appetites. Team Everyone-But-April won a smashing victory. _

_On the way home, Raph had the pleasure of listening to the Yankees embarrass the Dodgers in front of their home audience. Leo, always early to bed as he was early to rise, fell asleep. Mike and Don bantered about something, and Casey kept up an enthusiastic meta-commentary on the game and the people calling it. April spent most of the drive in a kind of amused silence. Or maybe a stunned silence. Or appalled. It was hard to tell. _

_And they had come back to Manhattan, without incident._

And now he is looking at yet another brick wall. He is facing a night of marching around, making no progress, until he gives up and sleeps in a sewer tunnel full of yesterday's rainwater.

It makes him mad.

He backtracks.

* * *

At some point, Don realizes that he is walking against the current.

That's awfully strange. He hasn't turned, certainly hasn't turned _around_, and water isn't known for suddenly reversing its flow.

He stops, looking around the tunnel. He hasn't yet passed anything he recognized, so either he is in a part of the sewer system he's not familiar with, or he is walking through tunnels so boring and bereft of detail that there's simply nothing _to_ recognize. As much as he's used to sewer tunnels and their subtle differences, most bricks, most pipes, look pretty identical to him.

The upshot being, that he is still completely lost.

Did the tunnel dip? Was he following the current downhill, and now he is walking uphill against it? He hadn't noticed a slope, hadn't noticed a deeper place where the water pooled at the bottom of the curve. Hadn't noticed a drain where the water was flowing out, equalizing its level.

But he must have passed through such a place.

Because water _does not reverse direction_.

He turns around and heads back.

He pays close attention to the walls as he walks, trying to find something moderately distinctive, something he can at least hold in short-term memory, so he will know if he starts walking in circles. After a few minutes of seeing nothing for his mind to latch onto, he stops, turns to the right, chooses a brick at eye level, and memorizes the pattern of the mold growing on it. When he's sure he knows this colony, selected at random for a brief flash of wayposting glory, as well as he knows the painted background of his fishtank, he turns and walks on.

A minute later he realizes he's walking against the current.

He whirls, as if he's expecting to see a little imp standing there, grinning at him roguishly and pulling the water in a direction it's not meant to go.

No one is there.

He glances in both directions, then follows the current, back in the direction he'd been heading in the first place.

He estimates his steps, counting back to the brick, turns left, and scans the wall. His chosen mold colony is right where he left it, basking in the warmth of his attention. He narrows his eyes at it, turns to the right, and keeps walking.

A minute later the water is pushing against his ankles as he walks.

"_What?_" After three passes, he still hasn't found anything unusual about the topography of this tunnel. The floor seems flat and solid. He draws his bo, holding it defensively behind him as he looks up and down the passage. Then he flips it in front of him, sweeping it across the ground as he moves slowly forward, tapping like a blind man with a cane.

"Where are you?" he mutters. "Where's the drain?"

The floor is absolutely smooth and level. And yet, sometime during his search, the current reverses again.

He raises his bo to his chest, and turns sideways to the passage, walking crabwise and watching intently for the place where the current changes.

He remembers, now, that one time, while browsing aimlessly across the Internet, he stumbled onto a video clip of a river that ran in both directions. The river's current swept down towards the ocean, as one would expect, but twice a day the rising tide brought a reverse current rushing upwards, until the two flows met in the middle, crashing into each other with crazy whirlpools and splashing waterspouts.

He feels certain he would have noticed a phenomenon like that during at least _one_ of his... what is it now? ... _five_ passes across this weird spot.

He shuffles back and forth - six, seven, eight times now - but he can never find the line, or the moment, where the current reverses, or meets an opposite flow, or whatever bizarre thing the water thinks it's doing.

_The water does not THINK it's doing anything._

All right. He has officially been dwelling on this too long now.

He flips his bo over his shoulder, slides it into its place against his carapace, and refuses to think about the strange behavior of the current anymore.

_The brick was on my right after I turned around once._

He locates the brick again, after a search through way more mold colonies than he ever really wanted to inspect at such close range, puts it on his left, and starts walking.

_Sometimes it seems like the whole world is against me._

He walks, and thinks about opposing forces.

_Saturday night. Donatello had ditched his bandana, his pads, his belt and gear in the attic, intending to go to bed, but before he got quite as far as lying down something had drawn him back to the kitchen. He found himself sitting at the table there, sketching hover-motors in an old notebook he'd borrowed from the study, scribbling tiny equations in the margins. _

_Soft footsteps, April's footsteps, came up behind him, and he absently inserted the eraser end of the pencil between his lips, frowning at his work. _

_April moved to the refrigerator, and pulled open the sticky door. "Hey, Mike." _

_Don blinked. He hadn't heard his younger brother come in, and Mike lacked both a specific reason and a general inclination to be quiet. Don looked up, failed to spot any of his brothers in the immediate vicinity, and turned to April in confusion. _

_She was standing at the counter, pouring herself a glass of milk. She set the jug down, glanced back at him, and momentarily mirrored his expression. "Oh, sorry, Leo." She smiled sheepishly, then capped the jug, returned it to the fridge, and came to sit at the table. _

_By the time she had done that, Don had figured out what was going on: without his distinctive bandana, April didn't know who he was. He and his brothers didn't look a thing alike, aside from the obvious broad similarities, but humans - even the few who knew them well - never seemed to be able to tell the difference. _

_He lowered his pencil. "No, April, it's me." _

_She squinted at him. "Donnie?" _

_He smiled crookedly and looked back at his drawing. _

_"Oh, I'm sorry," April said, curling her hands around her frosty glass. "I thought you went to bed." _

_"I thought so too." He scratched out a number in one of his equations and squeezed in a different one. _

_"What are you working on?" she asked. _

_He twirled the pencil between his fingers, a common habit that he was probably the reigning king of. "Do you remember those hover-carts the Utroms had?" _

_"Sure," she said. She had been there, the time they infiltrated the TCRI building, before they knew who and what the Utroms were. She'd been their inside person, getting into the security system and shutting down the defensive mechanisms preventing them from sneaking in through the roof, the windows, or any other place that a ninja normally sneaked in through. _

_"Well," he continued, "I've been trying to figure out how they work." _

_She frowned at him. "But you only saw them once." Then her expression cleared. "Oh, no, wait, Casey and I stole one. You still have that?" _

_He looked at her as though she had just asked him a ridiculous question, because, of course, she had. "I've been studying it," he went on, generously pretending that she had asked him something intelligent, "and I just had a thought, and I'm trying to see if it makes any sense." _

_She craned her head around to look at his sketch, and he turned the notebook. "See, the carts work on some kind of force, not magnetism, but strong, and subtle. It isn't like any kind of sustained-levitation you find on Earth." He put his hand to his chin. "Not like bird flight, or airplanes, or rocket boosters, or anything." _

_April set aside her glass of milk, without seeming to notice what her hand was doing. "Then what is it?" _

_"I'm not sure," Don admitted, "but it's amazing. It hovers above the ground -" He floated his hand over the scratched wooden surface of the table, to demonstrate. "- and when you put something on it, it hovers _at the same height_. The reaction, the accommodation, is incredibly fast and incredibly accurate. I can jump up and down on it and it never moves." _

_"Wow," April said, and not for the first time, Don appreciated finally knowing someone who recognized really cool technology when they saw it. _

_"I really want to figure this out," Don said, turning the notebook back around, "so I can do something with it. I wish I'd been able to ask the Utroms about it before they left." He drew a frustrated squiggle in the corner of the page. _

_"I thought you said you had an idea?" April said. She reached for her glass of milk, apparently not quite forgotten, and drank a little. _

_"Oh, yeah." Don traced over a line of his sketch, making it darker. "I was thinking it might be a kind of particle repulsion. But not magnetism, not charged ions... something about valence bonds." _

_"Things that won't mix?" April asked, trying to follow his train of thought. _

_"Things that never mix," Don said, "and that can repel with a variable amount of force." _

_April thought about that. "Supercharged noble gases?" she said. "It flies on neon?" _

_Don sighed. "You're right. It's stupid." _

_"It's not stupid," April told him. "Flying a kite in a thunderstorm didn't turn out to be stupid. Trying to sail around the world didn't turn out to be stupid." _

_He smiled. "Thanks, April." _

_She leaned back in her chair, and took another sip of milk. "What are you going to do with your brilliant discovery?" _

_He ducked his head. "I haven't discovered anything, yet. But if it works... it would be really good to have a small, maneuverable flying vehicle. For when we really need to get somewhere in a hurry." _

_"Sounds like it would be fun, too," April said. "Do you know how long people have been waiting for flying skateboards?" _

_Don hid his face in his hands. "Oh, God, don't even say it. Do you have any idea what Mikey would do with a flying skateboard?" He peeked up between his fingers. "I can't even trust him with _ground_ vehicles. He's a terrible driver." _

_"Really?" April looked surprised. "I thought he was good at those kinds of things." _

_"Oh, he's fine at controlling the vehicle. It's controlling his own impulse to speed around like a madman that he has a problem with." _

_"Oh," April said, and then "Oh" again, as she realized the full extent of the havoc that would be unleashed by the terrifying combination of Michelangelo and a flying skateboard. _

_"Yeah," Don said. "On the one hand, I know it would make him deliriously happy. On the other hand, he'd be a holy terror, and we'd never get him back on the ground." _

_"Tough decision," April said, nodding sympathetically. _

_"Anyway." Don dropped the pencil to the scarred tabletop, tore the used page out of the notebook, balled it up, and pitched it into the garbage can. April followed the arc of the crumpled paper, then looked back at him, clearly surprised that he'd just thrown out his work. "Don't worry," he said, pushing back his chair and standing up. "I remember what I wrote." He stretched, then stopped hurriedly when April turned away, obviously embarrassed by the fact that he was standing in front of her, even more naked than he usually was. "Um. Sorry." He backed out of the kitchen and hid himself behind the doorframe. "I'll see you in the morning." _

_"Good night," she said, but there was an awkward detachment in her voice. _

_Don trudged up the stairs. _

_Some things were never meant to be. _

_As attracted as April was to his mind, his body still repelled her._

The current stays resolutely against him. He sloshes through it, and hopes it's leading away from somewhere.


	5. Five

Five

Mike begins to suspect that he's not going in quite exactly the right direction when after ten minutes he still can't hear the rushing water of the runoff junction.

"Okay, Mikey," he mutters to himself. "Get a grip. You know this."

He goes backwards, takes the other fork, and is rewarded by the cooler, more humid air that mists from the waterfalls spilling out of the huge pipes into the catching pool below.

When he reaches the falls, he takes a minute to look over the ledge. The pool is twenty feet below, bubbling with the continuous energy of the water that streams into it from all directions. The pool is deeper than it looks, he knows, and somewhere at the bottom is a drain that carries the water on to its next destination.

Mike has never been sure why the system was designed this way, with the upper pipes ending abruptly in midair. It seems to him that the pipes should slope downwards, or the pool should be higher, or something.

Whenever he thinks about it seriously, he ultimately gives up trying to deduce the boring, hydrodynamic justification for the sudden aerial termination of the pipes, and concludes that it was designed this way for him, because he likes waterfalls. If they lived closer to this place, he would come here all the time, to dangle his legs in the spray, or sit on a ledge and draw, or just lose himself in the mist and the roar and the rush.

Waterfalls make his blood quicken.

But right now, waterfalls are not getting him to where he needs to go.

He leaves the falls behind, their vapor trailing from his body like they are trying to hold onto him. Their deep voices fade and mingle until it is only a whisper in his ear, inviting him to come again soon.

He's sure he's going the right way now, and the place where he and Don had waited isn't much farther along.

Which is good, because he's tired.

And his stomach is lurching with every step. Four hamburgers, two brownies, and a whole lot of potato salad are sitting heavily inside him, a reservoir of soda bubbling up through them in an uncomfortable way.

"Shouldn't have eaten all that," he groans, sliding gratefully down the wall. He is going to sit, and wait, exactly here, until someone comes back.

He rests his head against the wall. Waiting is not really his strong suit. A quick shuffle through his belt reveals that he has nothing to entertain himself with.

His attention wanders across the pitted concrete of the opposite wall, connecting the dots of the eroded craters to make funny pictures. When too many of the pictures start turning into monsters, he looks away.

He turns his gaze down the tunnel, towards the brick wall that blocks his path, and his thoughts drift towards home.

_"Psst." _

_Raph glared at him. "What, Mikey?" _

_Mike leaned a little closer. "You wanna blow this popsicle stand?" _

_Raph paused, then gave up on the length of foot-thick cable he was trying to lift. He straightened, and rolled his shoulders to ease the soreness in them. "Do I ever." _

_"Come on, then." Mike skipped backwards towards the door. "Let's go." _

_Raph followed. Mike thought they were about to make a clean getaway, but then he sensed someone behind him, froze in mid-skip, and pivoted slowly on one foot. _

_"Are you leaving, my sons?" Master Splinter asked, as though he were sure they couldn't possibly have been thinking of any such thing. _

_"Uh, yeah," Mike replied, lowering his other foot and plastering on a big, ingratiating smile. "We were going to, um, scout the tunnels. Because, the slide is great and all, Sensei, but we wanted to find a way down here that would be, you know, easier for _you..._" _

_Splinter's brow rose, and it was clear that he was not at all fooled by the explanation. _

_Mike's smile expanded cautiously, until it pushed against the borders of his face. _

_"Very well," Splinter said, with a small smile of his own. "But do not be long." _

_"Sure thing, Master Splinter," Mike said. He reached behind him, grabbed Raph's wrist, and propelled his brother towards the door. "Back before you know it." _

_And then they were out of the Lair, and into the comparative freedom of the tunnels. _

_"Smooth, Mikey," Raph said, and it was only half sarcastic. _

_"Seriously, though," Raph continued, after a moment. "Climbing up that chute was gonna get old fast." _

_"I guess," Mike said. His only real thought had been to duck out of cleaning duty for a while. He turned to look at his brother as they walked. "I mean, I know it'll take you, like, five minutes to know these tunnels inside out, but... d'you think you could pretend to be lost for a while?" _

_Raph grinned in the dim passage. "Never been a good actor, Mikey. But for you, I'll try." _

_They walked, as slowly as possible without the pace becoming completely awkward. Still, it didn't take long for them to come to a serviceable ladder leading upwards. _

_"Oh, man," Mike said, in exaggerated tones. "We'll never find the surface this way." He pointed to a side passage. "We had better try over there." _

_"Uh-huh," Raph said. "Up ya go, Mikey." _

_They climbed the ladder. Mike looked around at the higher tunnel, and was pretty sure he knew where they were. _

_"Yeah," Raph said, confirming his suspicions. "Know exactly where this is." _

_"It's really not far from the old Lair, is it," Mike said. _

_"Nah, not far," Raph replied. "Kinda weird we never found the new place before." _

_Mike shrugged. His thoughts were elsewhere. _

_"Hey," Raph clapped Mike on the shoulder. "The old den was gettin' too small anyway. This is a good thing." _

_"I guess," Mike said again, but without any real conviction. _

_"Come on," Raph said, moving a little way down the tunnel. "Wanna show you something." _

_Mike followed. They walked for ten minutes, maybe, away from the old Lair. Then Raph stopped and pointed up at a storm drain. "Look there," he said. _

_Mike climbed up to the drain, and peered through the low opening. Before him was a stretch of lawn, leading up to an ornate white-stone building. The building was illuminated by spotlights, making it stand out sharply against the dark sky. _

_"Is that City Hall?" Mike asked. _

_"Yep," Raph replied. "Pretty, ain't it?" _

_'Pretty' wasn't a word Raph used often. He seemed to hold it in reserve, only bestowing it on things that were truly beautiful. _

_"Yeah," Mike said. "It is." He climbed down from the drain, and pointed to the nearby manhole. "Not a good exit, though. Too many lights." _

_"I know," Raph replied. He waved vaguely down the tunnel. "There's another manhole there, in an alley, much better for... Well, anyway, we can use that one." _

_"Cool," Mike said. There was no point in commenting on what Raph had been about to say. They both knew. _

_"We oughta go back," Raph said. _

_"Yeah." Mike sighed at the idea of what he was going back _to_. Then he grinned wickedly. _

_"Race you to the slide." _

_He took off before his brother could reply. _

_But he let Raph win._

Mike turns his head again, away from the blocked tunnel. He lets his eyes rest on the dark ceiling.

And he waits.

* * *

Donatello knows that he is not always the world's most observant person. When he's busy with something, he can fail to notice some pretty major events. These have included small explosions two feet to his left, multiple people repeatedly calling his name, various non-lethal projectiles aimed at his head, and Michelangelo uttering the words "Hey, look what I can do!"

But, right now, he's pretty appalled at the important developments that he seems to keep missing. He _thinks_ he's paying attention. His mind is focused on, is intently interested in, what's happening around him. And yet, he keeps having these mental blinks where things are suddenly different than they were before, and he can never find the point where they changed.

Blink. And the water he's walking against is halfway to his knees.

Blink. The tunnel is a lot wider than it was before.

Blink. The walls are made of solid stone, rippled into water-worn patterns.

By slow but sudden degrees, the shallow trickle in a sewer tunnel has become a respectable stream in what appears very much like a natural cave.

_Where am I?_

Every time he looks up, the ceiling is significantly higher. It doesn't matter how often he looks up, or whether he looks back. He can never see the gradual rise, or the sharp cliff, or any other indication that the ceiling has ever been at any other height than where it is now.

It's extremely unnerving.

Kind of like the time he got engrossed in a book, and seven hours later he looked up to discover that someone had removed all the surfaces in his room, including the chair he had been sitting on, but kept all the objects in the room, including himself, in their original positions by suspending them from the ceiling with steel cable. He couldn't figure out where his brothers had gotten that much steel cable, or how they had managed to loop it around his legs and torso without him noticing and objecting loudly.

("What did you do?" he had shouted, when, shortly after disentangling himself, he had found Mike. "Deconstruct a bridge?"

He had continued in that vein for about thirty minutes. His lecture made absolutely no impression whatsoever, judging by the fact that, at the end of it, Mike was wearing the same huge, unrepentant grin that had taken up residence on his face half an hour earlier, when Don had first stumbled into the living room, still trailing a length of cable he hadn't yet managed to remove from his person.)

Mike had been smug about that one for _weeks_.

Don had gotten him back by replacing several of his favorite video games with subtle hacks, reprogrammed to kill Mike's character at surprising and inopportune moments. Don had spent most of that summer laughing silently, until Mike had figured out what was going on and "politely" requested his real games back.

After that, there had been a temporary reprieve in the prank war, until... until...

Well, Don couldn't remember who had done what to whom after that. But probably it had been very funny to someone.

At the moment, he isn't finding things very funny at all.

If this is a prank, he will hang up his prank weapons and surrender, declaring himself to be officially and permanently beaten.

He's pretty sure that, if the ceiling is even still there, it's at least two miles up.

But he isn't that far underground, unless he's been walking downhill this whole time, which he doesn't think he has been, in part because he's still walking against the current and water does not flow uphill.

(Even at those so-called "Mystery Spots", which he's also seen on the Internet. They're just illusions, hills that slope in the opposite direction from how they appear.)

He estimates he's walked about five miles now, in what _feels_ like a straight line. Manhattan's longest axis isn't even three times that distance. Sooner or later, he has to find the end of this thing.

He trusts in logic, and keeps walking.

* * *

Water laps gently at Leo's feet.

This expedition is not proving very fruitful. At one end of the passage, his way is blocked by stone. At the other, by water.

He has walked a long way through the tunnel, and has now arrived at the place where it curves downward, diving deeper below the gleaming new city above. As he stands at the top of the slope, he feels like an idiot. It had obviously rained a lot over the weekend, and water has a tendency to work its way to the lowest place. He knew this tunnel turned downwards, burrowing farther into the earth. He should have expected it to be flooded.

Leo toes the water, and grimaces. He has no great urge to attempt swimming in it. These lower levels are dim, lit only by the light that leaks down from the upper levels, which themselves are lit primarily by the sunshine and streetlamps of the surface world. By the time the light gets down to these old tunnels, it is thin, twice-used. Even the electric service lights that hum fluorescently in the upper tunnels are long defunct down here, or were never installed at all.

The water will be even darker. And Leo doesn't know whether the crenellated ceiling holds any pockets of air for him.

Anyway, he thinks that the next vertical passage is far, and in the wrong direction, rising up in a part of the city no closer to the Lair than the place where he left Donatello and Michelangelo.

Having thus come up with rational arguments to justify his desire not to plunge into the dark floodwaters, Leo turns back.

As he walks away, cursing himself for wasting so much time, he doesn't see the water behind him swirl with a strange current.

It takes him a while to cover the distance back to the place where he can exit the lower tunnels. When he thinks he's in the right area, he starts moving more slowly through the heavy darkness, feeling for the movement of air that indicates the presence of the ventilation shaft above him. When he feels the descending zephyr against the top of his head, not even strong enough to stir the tails of his bandana, he looks upwards. The shaft is marked not exactly by light, only by a brighter shadow, difficult to discern and too high to touch. Leo measures the circle with his eyes, and jumps, catching himself against the worn bricks with toes and knees and palms.

Patiently he works his way up the underground chimney. Little eddies of air hurry past him in both directions, but he lets them pass, keeping to his own steady pace.

_This isn't work. This is _life_. _

_Sunday. Leo had risen before the dawn, crept downstairs, and gone out into the still-cool morning to practice katas. It didn't matter that Master Splinter had told them they could take the weekend off. If Master Splinter had _forbidden_ them to do katas, Leonardo would have been tempted to do them anyway. _

_The dewy grass swept against his ankles. He did old katas, simple ones, ones he'd known for years. They made the time slide backwards, carrying him back to his younger self. _

_They are in the dojo of the old Lair. Michelangelo and Raphael have already performed the new kata passably, and been dismissed. He and Donatello are still there, trying to learn the moves, trying to reach the minimum competence that Master Splinter requires on First Time days. _

_Donatello has the basic pattern, and is practicing in a corner. Repetition will smooth the execution, allow him to pass muster under Sensei's critical eye. _

_Leonardo is having difficulty with the moves. He is eight years old, and sometimes he feels like he is at war with his own body. It won't do any of the things he wants it to do. He orders it to copy what Sensei is doing, and it makes up moves of its own. _

_"No," Master Splinter says patiently. "Try again." _

_Leo tries, and this time it feels good. He's sure he's done what Sensei did, if less skillfully, and on a smaller scale. _

_But - "No," Master Splinter tells him. "Watch me." _

_"But that's what I did!" Leo protests, after watching. And he repeats the moves. _

_"That is not correct," Master Splinter says. "Do it with me." _

_They perform the kata slowly, side by side, and Leo sees that he is doing the same steps, the same punches, the same blocks. _

_"It is not correct," Master Splinter tells him again, when they finish. _

_Leo is frustrated, near tears. How can he do the moves right, when he can't see what he's doing wrong? Blindly, he fumbles through the kata again, feeling for what seems, to his inexperienced mind, like it should be right. As if, if he just keeps doing it, sooner or later it will meet with his Sensei's satisfaction. _

_"No," Master Splinter says, when he's halfway through. Leo stops, presses the backs of his hands to his eyes. He wants to learn this, he _does_, but it isn't _working_. _

_"Starting position," Master Splinter says softly, and Leonardo shudders back to the beginning. _

_"Do nothing," Master Splinter says, and then he moves Leonardo, joint by joint, step by block, through the kata. Twice, slowly. _

_"Now you," Master Splinter says, and Leonardo performs the kata by himself, painfully, poorly. He knows he's doing it wrong, but Master Splinter acts as though he's doing it right, nodding every time Leo holds a pose, no matter how distant it is from the pose he _should_ be holding. _

_"Very good," Master Splinter says, when Leo is done, and bows. _

_Leo bows back. _

_In the field behind the house, Leo bowed. _

_Sometimes, he forgot how good he was, how much he had struggled for his skill. _

_It was good to remember. _

_He went inside, and stood in the kitchen, drinking water and watching the sun climb the sky. _

_Some time later, Raph joined him, and his thoughts turned away from the past, to the promise of a new day._

At the top of the shaft he plants his palms on the surrounding concrete, and lifts himself clear of the narrow space.

_Don't forget,_ he tells himself, as he rests momentarily. _Go back there sometime. Sometime when it hasn't rained._

He rolls his shoulders, and heads back to where he left his brothers.


	6. Six

Six

Don thinks he has seen some pretty weird stuff underground. He has seen alien sewers where huge machines with chomping teeth scour the tunnels, keeping them clean enough to eat off of, and occasionally menacing visiting mutants with their whirling blades.

He has seen, right below his own city, an ancient civilization powered by an enormous glowing crystal, which the residents use pencil-sized fragments of to telekinetically control rock.

Also in his own city, he has seen an illicit genetics lab where innocent human beings were transformed, against their will, into acid-spitting monsters that shunned sunlight.

And, right in his own home, he has seen - and made regular use of - an elevator with no obvious means of support or propulsion.

So when it comes to weird stuff underground, Donatello is difficult to impress.

Right now, he is impressed.

If he didn't know better, he would say that he wasn't underground at all.

In fact, if it weren't for the normal gravity and breathable atmosphere, he would have said he was on Mars.

The ceiling had continued to rise as he walked, lifting well out of sight, and the walls too have fallen away, leaving him in a vast, roofless plain of loose reddish-brown dirt.

The river had vanished at some point. He'd been slogging through water nearly up to his waist, and the next thing he knew, he was walking across dry, soft soil, leaving deep footprints with every step.

He hadn't bothered to look back.

The plain is flat, in a general way, undulating gently in dunes of roughly equal size and shape, which continue to the horizon in every direction, never pushing upwards into foothills or mountains.

He begins to wonder if he'd actually been walking _up_hill, until the tunnel ended and he emerged onto the surface.

But this can't be the surface either. He's quite sure there are no deserts in the Tristate Area.

_Maybe it's time to stop thinking of this as a linear journey._

He knows that he fell, or _something_, at least once, when he suddenly found himself in an unfamiliar place, separated from Mike. Maybe he's been walking through wormholes, time-space rifts, and keeps coming out miles from where he went in.

That would explain the bizarre environments he's been moving through, and why they keep changing so rapidly.

It would also mean that he has absolutely no hope of making orderly progress towards the places he wants to go.

And it means that, right now, he could be absolutely _anywhere_.

Don stops walking. Whatever's happening, he can't _see_ it happening, and he can't seem to make it un-happen by going backwards. For now, it seems safer to stand still.

_What is going on?_

Well, one thing at least is clear: He's much farther from home than he was at the beginning of this, with much less idea of what to do about it.

He kneels in the dirt, smoothes a patch of ground in front of him, and starts laying out all his equipment, seeing whether he has anything that could possibly be useful.

_Don thought the drive had gone pretty quickly, but then, he was better at sitting still than some of his brothers were. For those brothers, the van pulled into the gravel driveway not a moment too soon. Raph looked like he was about to punch through the wall, and Mike would have been right behind him. _

_As it was, Raph had the door open practically before Casey set the parking brake. "Catch ya later!" he called over his shoulder, as he took off into the woods around the farmhouse. _

_"Wait for me!" Mike called, as he scrambled from his position behind the front seats. _

_Leo got out of the van more sedately, tossing Casey his duffel, slinging April's bag over his own shoulder. _

_"Oh, no, I can carry it," April protested, but Leo only smiled and waved her off. _

_Don followed them into the house, reflecting on how easy it was to travel when you didn't wear clothes. Easier still, when there was a spare toothbrush waiting for you at your destination. He'd thought about bringing a book with him, a volume he'd been "getting around to" for the past six months, but ultimately he'd decided to leave it behind, on the grounds that he should spend the weekend doing things he _couldn't_ do at home. _

_Leo came back from putting April's bag in the bedroom, and paused halfway down the stairs, apparently surprised to see Don still standing there. "Aren't you going out?" _

_"We all are," Don said, and it served as an invitation, just in case Leo needed one. "I just thought it would be polite to wait for you." _

_Leo clearly understood what Don really meant: _I thought it would be wise to wait and make sure you didn't try to stay behind.

_"Come on," Don said. "We'll never catch them at this rate." _

_"Don't worry," Leo replied, moving towards the door. "We'll find them." _

_They found them in less than ten minutes. Raph and Mike were chasing each other in circles through the trees, tracing a holding pattern until their brothers arrived. _

_"You're it!" Mike announced, tagging Leo on the shoulder before bounding back into the overhanging branches. _

_And they were off. _

_The game lasted about an hour, until Mike called their attention to the rising full moon, red and enormous on the horizon. While they were appreciating it, he simultaneously tagged them all and declared himself the winner. _

_After that, they went back to the farmhouse to find something quieter to do before bed._

A dagger. A flashlight. A phone that doesn't work. Mike's tiny, chewed-on pencil.

_I thought I gave that back?_

None of this is going to help him. He stows his gear, stands up, and is mildly pleased to notice that nothing seems to have changed while he was thinking.

On the other hand, maybe that's not a good thing.

In a choice between standing still and having nothing change, and moving on and not knowing _what_ will happen... he'll take his chances.

Sooner or later, one of these invisible wormholes has to lead him back home.

Right?

_I sure hope so._

* * *

As he comes down the tunnel, Leo sees a Turtle-shaped shadow, and assumes another one is beyond it.

"I'm back," he announces, pretty unnecessarily.

"Hey," Mike answers. He sounds exhausted. "Any luck?"

"No." Leo comes to a halt, his gaze automatically sweeping the dim passage for the quieter of the two brothers he left here. "The tunnel is..." He breaks off, frowns, looks around more carefully. "Where's Donnie?"

"I don't know," Mike says miserably.

Leo sighs inwardly. This split-up-and-search strategy is getting increasingly disorganized. Without an efficient means of communication, it's going to be difficult to regroup and get everyone moving in the right direction... whenever they figure out where the right direction _is_. "Where did he go?"

"I don't know," Mike says again. He shifts, curling one leg under himself and resting on the outside of it. "We went back to where we came in, 'cause we figured we could get out there, go topside, figure stuff out... but we couldn't open it." He pauses.

Leo remains silent, waiting for Mike to resume. As the pause lengthens, he realizes something is off about his brother's breathing. He's about to ask about it, when Mike continues.

"So we came back here, to wait for you and Raph. But as we were coming, Donnie, he... he disappeared. I was following him, I was looking right at him, but he just..." A tiny but expressive movement of the hand. "Gone." His bowed head lowers another inch. "I came here, I've been waiting, but -" He tenses oddly, drawing into himself, and groans, his voice wobbling in and out, interspersed with pained exhalations of breath.

"Mikey." Leo crosses the last few feet between them, and kneels beside his brother, putting a hand on his back. "Are you all right?"

"I don't feel so good," Mike mumbles thickly.

Leo recognizes these symptoms. Most of the time Mikey has an iron stomach, completely immune to the forces of overeating and indigestion, and strangely able to accept and process food that a lesser creature's gastric tract would reject on principle. But on the rare occasions when Mike gets stressed out, his guts start to run in reverse, refusing anything that Mike tries to put in them during the ill-advised comfort-eating sprees that he has never quite learned not to indulge in. And when Mike gets stressed, and has already eaten a heavy meal...

"It's the burgers, isn't it," Leo says.

Mike covers his mouth, the mere mention of the name seeming to hasten the reappearance of the thing. "Don't," he moans.

Leo settles himself more comfortably, rubs Mike's shell slowly to soothe the rumbling inside, and plays out the predictable conversation inside his head.

_"I told you it was a stupid contest," Leo would say. "We couldn't win." _

_"But we could fight valiantly," Mike would say (if he had been in any shape to discuss such things). _

_"Yes," Leo would say, "and look where it's gotten you now." _

_"I didn't _know_ I was gonna get sick," Mike would protest. _

_"You didn't have to eat four," Leo would chide him. "_I_ stopped at three," he would add, with lofty austerity. _

_"I'm a growing boy," Mike would defend himself, with the implication that Leo is not a growing boy, because, ha-ha, he hasn't grown an inch since they were thirteen, and he is an amusing little midget, isn't that funny._

Leo rolls his eyes at the Mike in his head, and isn't at all sorry that he's missing out on a conversation that would inevitably lead to jokes about his height.

"It's okay," he says. "I'm here."

Mike leans into his touch, and Leo exudes all the calming powers at his disposal, because the floor of this tunnel is level, without surrounding ledges, and, as they discovered earlier, there is no current, and that means that there is nowhere for Mike to throw up that they won't both be standing in it.

"Feel better?" Leo asks, when Mike has uncurled to a point that almost resembles a normal posture.

Mike nods, though he doesn't seem too sure about it.

"Tell me again about Donnie," Leo says, as gently and nonjudgmentally as he can. "Where did you last see him?"

"Back... back there." Mike gestures vaguely in the direction from which they had first come in. "Before the waterfalls, before the sound of them. I don't... I don't know where he went."

"Did he say anything?" Leo asks.

"He said..." Mike passes his hand slowly over his stomach. "He said he didn't want to get lost. But we were coming back here, and he isn't, so he must be..."

Leo sorts out the implied conclusions to those phrases. _Isn't where he meant to go, must be lost._

"It's okay," Leo says again. "We'll find him."

Although it's taking him a little while to figure out _how_. He hadn't realized how much he'd come to rely on the shell-cells, in the relatively short amount of time that he's had one. They make it so much easier to find a brother, to coordinate, to go off alone without worrying about missing a vital development or sending everyone else into a panic.

These phones have given them some bad habits.

_Well, what did we do before we had them?_

Birdcalls. Sewer-sign. Straight tracking.

There are ways, and he remembers them.

"Downstairs?" Mike says, asking for more information about what Leo found there.

"No, blocked," Leo says. "Collapsed in one direction, flooded in the other."

He feels Mike's frown, more than he sees it. "Did we... did we miss a major natural disaster, or something?"

"I don't know," Leo says, yet again. Mike seems better now, almost ready to move, but a few more minutes of sitting and talking will only do him good. "Did Casey ever flip over to the news, or did he just listen to the baseball game all the way home?"

"What do you think?" Mike asks rhetorically.

Leo shakes his head. "If there'd been a major disaster..." he says slowly, "wouldn't that have affected the game?"

"Not unless it was 3,000 miles wide," Mike replies.

Leo looks at him quizzically.

"Away game." A second later Mike's face folds into the same questioning expression. "You didn't seriously think they started playing at eleven o'clock?"

"I really hadn't thought about it," Leo says honestly.

Mike stares at him disbelievingly. "You are so clueless."

Somehow, Leo had known that he wouldn't get out of this conversation without suffering some kind of good-natured insult. "I know," he says. He gets to his feet and offers Mike a hand up. Mike takes it, and leans heavily on it as he stands. "Are you okay? Really?"

Mike nods, with the conviction of knowing that he has to be.

Leo puts a steadying hand on Mike's shoulder. "Can you show me where you last saw Donnie?"

Mike nods again, with much more surety, and they set off down the tunnel.

At the vacated junction, a scrap of paper wedged between two pipes flutters in a sewer breeze.

While elsewhere, deep in the tunnels, a tall figure lets a thin stream of water slide from his palm.


	7. Seven

Seven

Raph's night has gone downhill amazingly fast. All he'd really wanted to do was go home, find out how the Yankee game ended, and go to bed. There was no way the Dodgers could have saved themselves in the ninth, but Raph had wanted to listen to the last half-inning, to see whether the Yanks completed the shutout.

_"Drive slower!" he'd yelled at Casey, when it became clear that the trip was going to come to an end before the game did. But Casey had only laughed and floored it down the nearly-deserted Cross Bronx._

Instead, his evening has been full of brick walls. He's lost count of how many times he's seen one, and bounced off it, heading away in an equal and opposite direction, like that weirdly mesmerizing screensaver on Donnie's computer. (Well, no, he hasn't lost count. He's just pretending he has, because the number is depressing.)

Some of the walls are irritatingly far along their passages, lurking at the end like a dragon in a deep cave, like the light at the end of the tunnel that turns out, at the last second, to be an oncoming train. The passages lead him onward, luring him with promises of success, only to slam abruptly in his face.

So, while there's a lot of forward motion in his search pattern, the general trend is backwards.

And really, he's just freakin' tired of seeing brick walls. He can handle one, or even two. But seeing dozens of them is repetitive and infuriating and he doesn't think he can take it anymore.

_He was pretty sure he had already seen this once tonight. _

_Back up. _

_Saturday night. Raph had been sitting on the roof of the farmhouse, looking at the bright curve of Scorpio above the red glow of Springfield, vaguely wishing he knew more about constellations. _

_After a while, he had given up on stargazing, climbed down to the lower part of the roof, and let himself in through the attic window. _

_Don had been there, standing over his bed, running his mask through his fingers. This wasn't especially odd, in itself, but Raph was pretty sure he had already seen that tableau, earlier in the evening. _

_"I thought you went to bed?" he said. _

_"I didn't," Don said shortly. _

_Something seemed off about Don's demeanor. "What's up?" Raph asked. _

_"Nothing." Don balled up his mask, abruptly, and threw it down onto the rest of his gear, where it was stacked on the floor at the foot of the bed. His bo was standing upright in the pile, balanced against the wall. _

_"Well," Raph said, "I thought I would hit the sack." _

_"How nice for you." _

_Raph guessed at the cause of Don's unusual grouchiness. "Couldn't fall asleep?" _

_"I don't want to talk about it!" Don kicked the bedframe with surprising force. The vibrations passed through the metal, into the wall, and jarred the bo from its position. It fell over with a noisy clatter. _

_"Talk about what?" Leo appeared at the top of the stairs, and paused at the end of the banister, surveying the scene. His eyes rested on Don. "I thought you went to bed?" _

_"Join the club!" Don shouted at him. He snatched up his bo and glared around the room, as though daring any of the inanimate objects there to ask him the same question. _

_Leo glanced at Raph, received only a shrug, and went to the wall by the closet door. "Should I assume that's what we're not talking about?" He unbuckled his sword belt and hung it carefully over a protruding nail, then unknotted his bandana and tucked it into the cross of the sheaths. _

_"Assume what you want," Don said. He propped the bo in its former place, pulled back the blankets on his cot, and threw himself down, turning his face to the wall. _

_Leo looked at Raph again, but Raph only shook his head, turning to his own bed. He stripped his gear quietly, automatically, dropping each piece to the floor and toeing it under the bed to join his sai. _

_He lay down. A minute later Leo turned off the light and slipped into his own cot. _

_"Good night," Leo said softly. _

_"'Night," Raph said. _

_Don didn't say anything._

He's worked his way nearly back to the first turnoff, to where he first left his brothers and headed off down that side tunnel. There's only one more passage left to try.

Raph lingers for a moment, trying to calculate the odds that, just around this next corner, there will be a brick wall.

On the one hand, he thinks the odds are extremely high that this passage, just like all the others, will be blocked.

On the other hand, it would be exactly his kind of luck, to discover that the very last tunnel he tried, the very first one he had passed, was the only _un_blocked tunnel, the only one that would take him home.

He stands there for a while, trying to figure out which hand will make him angrier.

In the end, he _leaps_ around the corner, striking a scary pose, daring the long-gone construction workers to have put another wall in his path.

They have dared.

They have dared extremely daringly, with triple-dogs and everything.

_Aw, who was I kidding?_

He estimates his anger at this development to be about a 7 on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being totally apathetic and 10 being "already killed the friggin' idiot who did that". Of course, this is the Raphael scale of anger, which is logarithmic and so escalates much faster than the normal scale, progressing from "moderately cheesed off" to "seriously considering homicide" in only one point.

He takes a breath, and slides back to a 6.8, safely below the threshold of "need to break something right now".

"But seriously," he says to the wall. "You're pissin' me off."

He gives himself a mental pat on the back, for talking through his feelings rather than expressing them by means of applying his fists to the object of his ire.

Now is the part where he walks away, like a mature, rational individual. Now is not the part where he -

"Fuck you and the furnace you were born in!"

- shouts obscenities at inanimate objects.

He turns away, with all the dignity he can muster, and stalks back to the main tunnel.

All right, so he is not a mature, rational individual. He probably never will be. But, on balance, he thinks he handled the problem rather well.

He now knows that the entire side tunnel, all the way up to the part that he isn't familiar with and really doesn't feel like exploring now, is a dead end, every single branch capped off with a wall. So, in one sense, he has saved his brothers a lot of marching around. At the same time, he hasn't learned anything useful.

It's all been a colossal waste of time.

Almost three hours, by his reckoning.

"Yo, guys," he calls, as he sloshes out of the enormous rat-trap - no offense to Master Splinter - that he's been wandering around in. "There's no -"

He pauses.

"Guys?"

_Yeah, that's nice. Run off and ditch the guy who's been busting his butt to make your lives easier._

A flutter of white catches his attention. He crosses the tunnel, reaches up into the pipes, and plucks out the scrap of paper wedged between them.

"'Gone back to entry point, know we can get out there, see you at home. D + M.'"

He smacks his forehead. "They couldn'ta thoughta that _before_ I took off?" He frowns at the note. "D and M, huh? What happened to L? You ditch him too, _D and M_?"

Something is showing faintly through the thin paper. He flips the scrap over.

A second later he bursts out laughing. "'Pointy end towards...' - good one, Mike!"

He wedges the scrap of paper back into the crack where he found it, in case "L" did get left behind somewhere, and this message is intended for him as well. Then he starts back towards the first manhole, trailing his laugh behind him.

The sound of merriment fades, and for a few minutes the junction is quiet and still. Then, with no apparent cause, the scrap of paper slips from its place between the pipes. It twirls down through the air like a leaf, and comes to rest on the surface of the water.

After a moment it sinks, and disintegrates into nothing.

* * *

Mike stops. "Here."

Leo glances swiftly around the tunnel, his trained mind rapidly sorting and processing everything he sees. There are no side passages here, only the way they have come from, and the way they are going. There are no signs of a fight, and no left-behind objects, nothing out-of-place in the quiet sewer.

"All right," Leo says. "And where were you when you _didn't_ see him?"

"_Here_," Mike repeats, impatiently. "I told you, it was that fast." He holds up his empty palm, then folds it in a semblance of one of his sleight-of-hand tricks. "There, not there." When Leo looks at him doubtfully, he adds, "I'm serious, Leo. I was watching. He just _disappeared_."

"Okay," Leo says. "Calm down." Even as he says it, he sees that "calming down" is not something that is going to happen to Mike in the near future.

He looks around the tunnel again, and sees at least six places where a mutant turtle could easily hide, if he also happened to be a ninja. There might be other places that he isn't seeing. Certainly it wouldn't have been _difficult_ for Donatello to hide in this tunnel, if he had wanted to do so. But Leo can't see why Don would have wanted to hide. If there was danger, he would have warned Mike. If his goal was to _scare_ Mike, well... Don was not really given to spontaneous practical joking, and he certainly never carried a joke to the point of causing a brother genuine distress.

A point which Mike had obviously passed long ago.

"He said..." Mike jitters, glances over his shoulder, hops closer to his brother. "He said there might have been a chemical spill? And that's why everything was blocked up? Maybe..." He starts jigging awkwardly from foot to foot, like he's trying not to stand on the ground. "Maybe he stepped in something, and got, like, vaporized?"

Leo can't help looking down, and wondering if his feet feel like they're melting a little.

_No. No, they do not. That's just sludge between your toes._

Mike sees his gesture, his expression, and it ratchets him into a higher level of terror. "Oh my God, Donnie got vaporized!"

"Donnie did not get vaporized!" Leo says with authority, as though his saying it will make it true. _Somebody_ has to act like things will be okay, and right now he's the only one capable of it. Mike is on the verge of panic, of tears, of one of those explosive Mikey flip-outs that always either made everything ten times worse, or obliterated every obstacle in a fifty-meter radius.

Leo would really rather not deal with those things right now.

"He's okay," Leo says, and it sounds like an order. "We're going to find him."

Mike just looks at him helplessly.

That's the weird thing about Mike. He's a more-than-competent ninja, and he knows it, and he wears that confidence like armor. But sometimes his aura of power and invulnerability just vanishes, and he becomes completely dependent. Times like those, Leo has no choice but to carry his youngest brother, until he finds his feet again.

"Mike," Leo says seriously. "I need you to pull yourself together."

Mike lifts his shoulders, like he's trying, but Leo can tell there's no mental effort behind it. Mike has given up, poured himself into his leader's hands, entrusted himself totally to Leonardo's skill and determination.

Leo looks at Mike for a long minute, standing there, waiting to be told what to do.

"Come on," he sighs.

Mike sticks close behind him as he walks, and Leo knows that this must have been what Mike did to Donnie as well. There was no way Mike would have let Don out of his sight.

_Vaporized..._

Leo shivers, and watches his step.

He's so intent on watching the ground that he almost doesn't notice an archway to his left. "Wait a minute," he says, stopping suddenly. He expects Mike to bump into him, but it's pretty impossible for Mike to get any closer than he already is, so the actual collision is just a minor scrape of plastron against carapace, buffered by the soft leather of Leo's sword-sheaths. "Where does this go?"

Mike shrugs. Leo feels the rise and fall of his shoulders.

"I don't remember this being here when we came in," Leo says. They must be close to the first manhole now. Or did they miss it? Maybe they've overshot, started walking away from it in the opposite direction. "You said you couldn't get out, where we came in?"

Mike shakes his head.

Strange. Leo sweeps the passage with his gaze, but it's impossible to tell whether Donatello has been here. It's not easy to track in a sewer tunnel. If a passing person leaves footprints at all, they're hidden and quickly erased by the flowing water. Dropped objects can only be found by feel. Even Master Splinter, with his famous nose, has difficulty tracking in the sewers, where the running water and the overwhelming smell of damp refuse drown out everything else.

Leo tries to remember what street corner they entered the sewers at, what he knows about that section of the tunnels. Not much. It isn't a part of town they visit often.

_Well, it looks like it runs down towards the Q, which intersects the Green line..._

"All right," he says. "Let's try this way."

They pass through the arch, into a tunnel that looks much like the one they just left.

Leo watches where they're going, and Mike watches Leo, and neither of them sees the archway behind them draw closed, knitting itself together and melding with the rest of the wall, until it vanishes altogether.

* * *

Far below the city, the tall man smiles.

A vertical disc of water floats above his palm. In it, Leonardo walks through an unremarkable sewer tunnel. His brother clings to his back, following him as closely as possible.

The image moves, panning away from Leonardo, skimming over the ground he has just covered, flying back to where he turned from one tunnel into another.

In the disc, an arch. In the arch, darkness.

Circles within circles.

The man dips the staff in his other hand, and the doorway in the image seals itself, becoming again an ordinary wall. It does not exist. Just as it never existed.

The image stays focused there, on the changeless wall, but the man remains intent on watching it.

He is rewarded when Leonardo's other brother, the one who first separated himself from the group, passes in front of the wall. The water-mirror is silent, as always, but the Turtle looks like he is laughing.

He will not be laughing long.

The Turtle walks through the edge of the image, out of view, never noticing that he has passed the place where his brothers have turned aside from light and safety, and gone to their deaths in the cold blackness.

Now, it is the man's turn to laugh.

He does, loud and hard, and the echoes join with him, filling the deep tunnels with their mirthless peals.


	8. Eight

Eight

"This can't be right," Leo says, though he's not sure what he's objecting to.

The fact that there are no enormous caverns under New York City doesn't negate the fact that he's standing in one right now.

And 'enormous' is the right word for it. The farthest point that he can see is clearly only the middle of the chamber. Far out on the horizon of his vision, vast columns rise up from the floor, bigger than he and his brothers together could encircle, supporting a ceiling that itself is lost in shadows.

And speaking of shadows...

"Where is the light coming from?" he asks.

A diffuse light, not exactly bright, but not exactly dim either, is filling the cavern. It doesn't seem to be coming from any particular direction, and Leo is pretty sure that the intensity of it is shifting gradually, becoming stronger and weaker in a steady fluctuation.

Mike is obviously wondering the same thing. "Radioactive mushrooms?" he suggests.

Leo glances back at the doorway they came in through. It's just a rough, rounded opening, leading back into smaller, dimmer tunnels, that themselves lead back to the unfamiliar archway. "What do you think?" he asks. "Forwards or backwards?"

Mike shrugs.

Leo thinks. Mike has covered the ground behind them pretty thoroughly. Don is not there, and neither is a way home. On the other hand, if Don had seen a place like this, he surely would have gone in to investigate.

And anyway, how much more lost can they get?

"All right," Leo says. "Forwards. But let's stick to the wall."

They start to the right, following the long outward curve of the cavern. Leo feels incredibly small in this space. Between the bizarre sense of scale and the repeating patterns of ripples on the wall, he has the sense that he isn't moving forward at all, just walking in place on some weird giant treadmill.

They walk, and walk, and walk.

"I don't get it," Leo says finally, as they pause to rest. "How big can this place _be_?"

Mike doesn't have an answer.

While they rest, leaning against the wall, looking out at the distant columns whose aspects don't seem to have changed at all, Leo takes the opportunity to regroup, to strategize.

He unbuckles one of his elbow pads, and drops it to the floor.

Mike looks at him questioningly.

"So we'll know if we come around the circle," Leo explains.

"Won't we know, when we pass the entrance again?" Mike says.

"Good point," Leo says, but he leaves the pad behind when they move on.

Leo pays more attention to the patterns on the wall now. There are long curves like coiled dragons, and irregular bumps like leering faces. They remind him of the carvings in the lower tunnels, except formed by water and time instead of by chisels and artistic vision.

_The sight of Michelangelo looking delighted with himself always made Leonardo a little nervous for his own safety. _

_Saturday morning. Mike offered Leo a huge grin and the torn-off corner of a piece of paper. Leo looked suspiciously at the former, and cautiously took the latter. _

_It was a new addition to Mike's ever-growing collection of comic strips and one-panel cartoons. This one was of the single-picture variety, and depicted a small, strangely young-looking Leonardo with a sword balanced across his hands and a question mark floating above his head. A normal-sized Mike stood over him, one finger uplifted, a professorial expression on his face. The words "Pointy end towards enemy" were coming from his mouth. _

_"I don't get it," Leo said, after studying the picture for a minute. "Why do you look ten years older than me?" _

_"Artistic license," Mike replied. _

_"Why don't I know anything about swords?" _

_"Because it's funny." _

_Leo looked at Mike blankly. _

_"Okay, fine, it's not funny." Mike pinched the paper from Leo's fingers and stuffed it into his belt. "Another one for the dud file." _

_Mike saved all the comics he drew, regardless of whether or not his limited test audience judged them to be funny. Nobody quite knew why. _

_Leo was sorry he made Mike's smile fade, but he really didn't see what was so amusing about someone who didn't know which way to point a blade. _

_Especially when the ignorant person was himself._

They never come across any mushrooms, radioactive or otherwise.

But they do, eventually, come back to the lonely leather pad.

"I'm confused," Leo says. He seems to say things like that a lot lately. His gaze travels up the curving wall. It's climbable, if they go slowly, and some of those shadows might be openings...

Mike is looking in the opposite direction. "Let's try the middle."

"Don't be silly," Leo says. "The exit won't be -"

Mike shrinks.

Leo sighs, crouches to pick up his pad, then sits, signaling Mike to sit with him. "Sorry," he says. "I don't like this."

"Me neither," Mike says, hunching up against the wall.

They're silent for a moment, thinking, resting.

"Maybe -" Mike says tentatively. "Maybe there _was_ a spill, like Donnie said. Maybe we stepped in it, and we're, like, hallucinating?"

Leo runs his hand over the very solid wall. "It doesn't _feel_ like a hallucination."

"That's what they want you to think," Mike says, with a trace of his old humor. Then he sobers. "I'm scared, Leo."

"It'll be okay," Leo says, even though he really can't promise that right now. "You can pick where we go next. Since I'm not doing a very good job of it."

He's not always the Master of Everything, and he can admit when he doesn't know what he's doing.

Mike nods, affirmatively first, then towards the columns. "I want to try over there."

"Sure," Leo says. "Whenever you're ready." He sandwiches his pad between elbow and knee, and threads the strap through the buckle with one hand, pulling it tight and tucking in the end.

"Do you think it's far?" Mike asks.

"What?"

"The columns?"

"Unless they're a lot smaller than I think they are," Leo replies.

Mike glances at him. "A few minutes?"

"Take your time." Leo leans back against the wall, and rests, and waits.

* * *

Raph has no difficulty finding the manhole.

What he does have difficulty with, is getting the damn thing open.

As he strains against the cover with all of his considerable might, he gets the feeling that the rungs of the ladder he's standing on are going to give before the piece of metal above his head does.

He jumps down, and stands there, scratching his head, his other hand on his hip, contemplating his next move.

Did Don and Mike get out? If they didn't, where did they go after their plan failed?

Not backwards, that's for sure. He searched all of those tunnels too thoroughly for them to slip by him.

Forwards, then? On past the point where they had intended to escape?

Raph sure hopes not. He's rarely been in those tunnels. He's sure his brothers haven't travelled through them any more often, and they won't remember as well as he does.

"Ya couldn't've stayed in one place?" he mutters, to nobody. He shakes his head. "And people say _I'm_ impatient."

Well, he pretty much has to explore those tunnels now anyway, since he's exhausted all other viable options for getting home. Sooner or later, he's bound to catch up with the others.

He sets off.

As he walks, subtle clues nudge the little cartographer in his brain, and his mental map for this area unscrolls, automatically rotating as he moves through the twisting tunnels.

_I haven't been here since..._

He doesn't know. Nothing interesting ever happened to him here.

It's been a while, anyway.

_Raph watched his marshmallow burn, and wondered exactly what was in the sugary puffs that made them so flammable. _

_Saturday evening. They'd walked out to the pond behind the barn, built a campfire, and started toasting marshmallows. As the darkness gathered, Mike launched into a story about something that had purportedly happened to him, and which Raph did not believe a word of. _

_"There I was," Mike said, clearly aware of the dramatic way the firelight flickered across his face. "Everything was on the line; I was one move away from losing it all. 'All right,' I said. 'Draw.'" _

_Everyone leaned forward, listening intently. _

_"He drew," Mike went on. "And I smiled at him, and I said, 'Hit me.'" _

_Everyone leaned a little closer. _

_"And he did," Mike said, dragging out the story, relishing his audience. "Then I said to him, 'Whaddya gonna do now?' And he said... 'Show me whatcha got.' So I did." _

_"And?" Casey asked. He hadn't noticed that his marshmallow had fallen into the fire and was rapidly turning to charcoal in the flames. _

_"And..." Mike leaned back, casually picking his perfectly-toasted marshmallow off his stick. "Then we showed each other our hands. I had blackjack, he had eighteen. Won a hundred bucks that night." _

_"Oh yeah?" Raph said. "I never saw this hundred bucks." _

_Mike shrugged and popped the marshmallow into his mouth. "Blew it on a game of three-card Monte on the way home." _

_As if a ninja could be fooled by a cheap find-the-queen trick. _

_"You are such a liar," Raph said. _

_Mike looked affronted. "I am not. I'm a teller of creative truths." _

_"I see the 'creative'," Don said, loading another marshmallow onto his stick. "But where's the 'truth'?" _

_Mike thought about it for a moment. "I did win a game of blackjack once." _

_"That was against me," Leo put in, "and the pot was nine screws and two red checker pieces." _

_"Why do you remember this?" Raph asked. _

_"It was last week," Leo said. _

_Raph tried to calculate the necessary rate of inflation to go from "nine screws and two red checker pieces" to "a hundred bucks" in a week, and failed. _

_"I want those screws back, by the way," Don said. _

_"They're mine," Mike replied. "You'll have to win them from me." _

_"Since you've only ever won a single game of blackjack," Don said dryly, "I don't think that will be very difficult." _

_Raph blew out the remains of his marshmallow, and watched the smoke curl up from the blackened lump._

Raph walks on.

_If only I had two red checkers for every brick wall I ran into..._

Although, come to think of it, he hasn't seen any for almost an hour now.

Somehow, he doesn't think this state of affairs will last.

* * *

For the first time since they entered this cavern, Leo feels like they're making progress.

The columns are exactly as far away as he thought they were, but he and Mike walk steadily, and the columns loom closer, changing from large-in-perspective to large-in-actuality in the way he expects.

"Look," Mike says, and Leo knows what he's referring to.

The columns form a ring, and in the middle of them is a pool of water. The water is giving off a blue glow, and seems to be the light source for the entire cavern. Why the water is glowing, or how it manages to cast an even light across this entire huge space, Leo doesn't know.

"I see it," Leo says. "But look at the columns."

As they enter the ring, it becomes obvious that the eight pillars are spaced evenly in a remarkably, well... _circular_ circle. As though they were placed there, built there, rather than being formed by the slow drip of water on limestone over millions of years.

They approach the pool, and Leo begins to notice that there are some pretty strange things about that too. Besides the fact that it's glowing, it also has a decidedly un-flat surface. Around the edges of the (also circular) pool, the water rises up in a pillowy curve. Then, in the center, it plunges downward, in a funnel shape.

"It's a waterfall," Mike says. "Like... an inside-out waterfall."

"But where does the water come in from?" Leo asks. This pool has no tributaries, and he hasn't seen or heard or felt the ceiling drip once the whole time they've been in here. "And why isn't it making any noise?"

Mike listens. "Maybe because... it's flowing up?"

Leo whips his head around to stare at his brother in confusion, then looks back at the pool. Mike is right. Now that he's paying more attention to the movement of the water, he sees that the water is _rising_ from the funnel, coming over the curve and splashing gently against the edges of the stone pool.

So why doesn't the pool overflow?

Or, more importantly, why is the water _defying gravity_?

Leo takes a step back from the pool. Mike goes forward, crouching and putting out his hand to feel the shining curve of the water.

"Mike..." Leo says.

Mike retracts his hand, glancing back at Leo. Then he looks again, frowning over his brother's shoulder.

"What?" Leo turns, but doesn't immediately see what's caught Michelangelo's attention.

"Look at the column," Mike says.

Leo scans the pillars, but still can't see anything especially noteworthy about them. At least, nothing that he hasn't already noted. "Which one?"

"That one."

Mike points, and Leo follows his finger. The column in question is on the opposite side of the circle from how they approached. It looks pretty much like the other seven.

No, wait. Now that he's focused on it, Leo sees that the column Mike is interested in has a ridge running around it, threading upwards in an even spiral.

No - not a ridge.

A staircase.

_A staircase?_

Mike rises from his crouch and moves towards the pillar, his head tilted curiously. "What do you think it is?"

_Besides the obvious?_ Leo studies the stairs. They look flat and even. Certainly not natural, and if man-made, then put there by someone very skilled and determined. Either that, or... "Maybe it's part of the underground city."

"Oh, yeah," Mike says, his curiosity seeming to restore some of his confidence. "They coulda done it in, like, ten seconds." He raises his hands, focusing imaginary superpowers towards the pillar. "Where d'you think it goes?"

Leo tilts his head back. _Up. Really far up._ "I don't know."

"Let's follow it," Mike says, walking towards the pillar, angling around it to find the bottom of the staircase, which can't be seen from their current viewpoint.

"Mikey..." This is a bad idea. This _has_ to be a bad idea. Leo seriously doubts that this staircase leads anywhere, and finds it much more likely that, if they attempt to climb the narrow spiral, they will both eventually take a wrong step and fall to their deaths.

On the other hand, he _did_ put Mike in charge of picking their direction.

He follows Mike around the pillar. Mike is already standing on the bottom step. "Come on," Mike says. He turns and starts climbing. In a minute he has disappeared around the first curve.

"Mike, wait!" Leo takes the shallow steps three at a time until he catches up. The catching-up happens abruptly - Leo hadn't expected Mike to actually stop, and nearly tackles him off the stairs as he hurtles upwards.

They're only fifteen feet off the ground, but this is exactly the kind of thing Leo was afraid of. He steadies himself with a hand against the pillar, and notices how smooth it is. Nothing in the way of handholds. If they fall, they'll have to catch themselves on the outside edge of the stairs. He looks up and estimates the distance between levels of the spiral to be thirty feet, though the sheer size of the pillar, its massive diameter, means that the stairs aren't steep at all.

"Let's take it slow, okay?" he says.

Mike nods, and they begin the climb.


	9. Nine

Nine

Leo is rapidly getting tired of walking in counter-clockwise circles. As before, he has the strange feeling that they're not actually moving. The ceiling is still out of sight, as high above them as it ever was, and he doesn't think the ground is visible anymore either. Although he's not really sure, because he is resolutely not looking down. He keeps his gaze focused on the next step, the next step, Mike's heels swinging in and out of his field of vision.

_One foot in front of the other._

It's taking all of his mental strength to stay focused on the monotonous staircase, to place his foot squarely every time, and not slip or catch his toes on the edge of a step. He'd never known walking up stairs could be so difficult, but these stairs go on forever, and he's battling just to stay awake. Only the fear of losing the slight curve in his path, and walking straight off the edge of the staircase, is keeping him alert.

_Not all of us slept in the van._

It feels like _days_ since Raph made that comment to him.

Maybe it has been.

They haven't said anything for a while, concentrating only on staying awake, on moving forward, but Leo breaks the silence now. "Mike... are you sure you want to keep going?"

"Yeah," Mike says, and Leo hears both exhaustion and determination in his voice. "Why? Do you think we should go back?"

Honestly, Leo is afraid to try turning around. Going down backwards doesn't seem like a good idea either. "Only if you want to."

"No," Mike says. "Not yet."

They climb.

Leo's mind keeps wandering, seeking something more pleasant to fix on, trying to go back to the wonderfully trouble-free weekend, but Leo just blinks hard and focuses again on the endless stairs.

He looks up, and the next level is still thirty feet above them, the ceiling is still lost in darkness.

He realizes how weird that is. There's blackness above him, and he _feels_ like there's blackness below, but the place where they're walking is bathed in the same soft blue light that filled the cavern floor. Leo doesn't know much about the properties of light, but this seems to qualify as an even higher level of strangeness than the upside-down waterfall's ability to illuminate the chamber with a glow that is as intense near the walls as it is just above the pool.

_Don't look down. Don't look down._

He looks down.

As he expected, the pillar stretches away below them, and the floor of the cavern is lost in gloom.

As he didn't expect, there's no curve of stairs thirty feet below. In fact, there are no stairs lower than the one he's standing on.

_All the steps behind him have vanished._

He yelps, resists the urge to leap away from the precipice at his back, and shouts, "Hurry up! _Go!_"

Mike picks up the pace, without question, and Leo races after him, double-timing it up the steps. He doesn't look back until they've gone halfway around the pillar.

When he _does_ look back, there are still no stairs behind him.

"Move!" he shouts, and Mike speeds up again. They round the column at a breakneck pace, momentum threatening to throw them off the stairs at any moment. Leo scrambles upwards, as close behind Mike as he dares. Every time he glances back, the stairs behind him have been swallowed up. He climbs in sheer terror, certain that in the next instant whatever's destroying the stairs will catch up to him, take the ground he's standing on, and send him plummeting to his death.

"_Faster!_" Leo shouts in a panic, even though greater speed only increases the danger of missing a step, of leaning too far to the outside. He's on all fours now, grabbing for handholds that aren't there, trying to lower his center of gravity. Mike is doing the same thing, judging by the changed angle of his flying feet.

And then, suddenly, Mike is gone.

"_Mikey!_" Leo throws himself upward, prays that Mike hasn't lunged too far in his wild race for the heights...

... and crashes headfirst into a wall.

He lies there for a long moment, stunned, while the stars clear from his vision. He moves his arms, feeling the wide, flat surface he's come to rest on. Then he rolls over, very carefully, and takes stock of the situation.

Mike is sitting beside him, rubbing his head, looking alternately at Leo and at the hole in the floor they've just come up through. "What happened?" he asks.

Leo rolls over again, and crawls on his stomach to the hole. Cautiously, he peers over the edge.

Mike sticks his head over the opposite edge. For a moment, they're both silent. Then Mike says: "Where are the stairs?"

Leo backs away from the hole, and sits up on his knees. "They were disappearing from behind me." He closes his eyes against the pounding pain in his head. "Are you okay?"

"Been better," Mike says. "But also been a lot worse."

Leo makes himself open his eyes, and stand up. They're in a tunnel now, stone, rounded. Its diameter is safely greater than his height, but no higher. If he stretched up his arm, he could touch the ceiling. Aside from the hole in the floor, he can see no openings. In one direction, the passage ends abruptly, as though it had been capped off, or as though someone had stopped constructing it at that point. In the other direction, it stretches on out of sight.

_Only one way to go._

Mike is standing up too, now, looking around. "Leo..." he says slowly. "D'you feel like we're being... _herded_, somewhere?"

Leo looks down at the hole again. _No way back._ "Come on," he says.

They start down the passage. It's filled with the same diffuse, sourceless light as the cavern below, but more grey than blue. Stone-colored.

The tunnel is wide enough for them to walk side-by-side, but the curving floor makes it easier to go single-file. Leo takes the lead. Mike follows close behind, but not as close as earlier. Oddly, running for their lives seems to have restored some of his confidence.

As they walk, their way is occasionally impeded by stalagmites, cone-shaped spires rising from the floor. They step around them. In other places, stalactites hang from the ceiling. They duck their heads, or shift to the side. Occasionally, the tunnel is bisected by a column, a smaller cousin to the huge pillars below, where a stalactite and stalagmite have met in the middle, and fused into a single formation. They plant their feet higher on the curve of the wall, slide through the open semi-circle, and continue on their way. Sometimes, they encounter a pair of spires, a stalactite and stalagmite that are growing opposite each other, and which will one day become a single column. Some are still millions of years from touching; others are separated only by an inch. The Turtles admire them, or ignore them, and keep moving.

"How far do you think this goes?" Mike asks.

"I don't know," Leo says. It's not like they have much choice but to follow it.

The spires and columns begin to curve, become wave-form, serpentining as they rise and descend and come together.

Leonardo and Michelangelo walk on.

"Look at this," Mike says.

Leo turns back, to see Mike looking closely at the last stalagmite, pointing to the tip of it. Leo moves towards it, and sees that the back-and-forth curve is capped with a tiny, perfect spiral. Mike pokes it with his finger.

"Let's keep moving," Leo says. He turns, and Mike hurries after him.

A few minutes later, he stops short.

"What?" Mike says.

Leo points up. Just ahead of them is a spiral stalactite, three feet long. If it were straightened out, it would probably be longer than the width of the tunnel.

"Weird," Mike says.

They keep moving. They barely blink at the spiral column blocking their way. They just squeeze around it.

The next formation, though, brings them to a dead halt.

"Are you seeing this?" Leo asks.

"Um..." Mike shifts and looks over Leo's other shoulder, as if the view might be different from there. "Yeah."

It's a lump of rock, floating in the air.

Just... _floating in the air._

It's diamond-shaped, thicker in the middle than at the top and bottom. It's as if a column decided to start in the middle, and grow towards the floor and ceiling, instead of doing things in the normal way.

Leo passes his hand over the rock, quickly. Then he sweeps his foot under it. Then he backs away.

Mike moves around him, advancing towards the strange formation. He pokes it with his finger. Then he pushes it with his palm. Then he leans his weight on it.

The rock doesn't move.

"I think," Leo says, "that we should go now."

After that, they pass no more formations. The passage is empty, featureless, endless.

"Does this _ever_ go anywhere?" Mike asks, eventually.

"Look, there," Leo says, pointing ahead. "The light is different."

Several dozen yards ahead of them, the light in the tunnel is warmer. It has colors other than grey.

They cover the distance quickly, and then stop, trying to figure out what they're looking at.

They have finally come to an opening in the tunnel. It's more like a window than a door, eight feet wide, five feet high. There's a knee-high ridge of stone below it, and a narrow lip of overhang above. The corners are rounded.

What's more interesting, though, is what they can see _beyond_ the window.

"Is that... a..." Leo starts, unsure he wants to finish the sentence.

"I think it's an island," Mike says.

It looks very much like an island. A tropical island, complete with sandy beaches and waving palm trees. The island is surrounded by clear blue water, rippling gently. Roughly half a mile of this inviting-looking water stretches between the island and the grey passage, and it laps softly at the stone sill.

The whole scene is covered by a bright, cloudless sky.

"I am so going there," Mike declares, and makes to climb over into the water.

"Mike, wait." Leo catches his brother's arm, makes him stop. "That can't be real."

"Why not?" Mike says, looking longingly at the island. "We've seen loads of weird stuff underground, and all of -" He pauses, rethinking that. "Well, _most_ of it was real."

Leo moves forward, narrows his eyes at the unlikely scene, and dips his finger into the water. He recoils instantly.

"It's like ice!" he gasps.

Mike can't resist touching the water. A small wave splashes over his hand, and he also jumps back. This isn't what people usually mean by "like ice". This water is clearly below the freezing point. It just hasn't bothered to become solid.

"But the air is so warm!" Mike wails. He glares out at the island, as though it had betrayed him.

"Come on," Leo says, pulling Mike forward, away from the window.

Mike yelps at the cold press of Leo's finger against his skin. "Okay, I'm coming!"

They return to the monotonous greyness of the tunnel, leaving the strange island behind.

After only a few minutes of walking, they come to another window. This one opens onto a cool, leafy forest, silent except for the wind rustling through the trees. They pause briefly, look, and move on.

The next window offers them a fantastical cloudscape. The next is a kind of multi-level stadium. The next is a sunny meadow, with butterflies fluttering over wildflowers.

The next is the angel fountain in Central Park.

"We're saved!" Mike cheers. He leaps forward, but again Leo holds him back.

"Wait," Leo says.

Mike shakes him off. "What's the deal, Leo? We can get home from here!"

Leo scans the scene. It's nighttime, deserted. It _looks_ very much like the familiar plaza. They _could_ get home from here, heading south overland, to their Lair downtown. Assuming that, when they got close, they could find a way back into the sewers.

It _seems_ like a good plan. But something feels wrong. Leo frowns and tries to figure out what's bothering him.

Then he realizes: _If this is the plaza, then where am I?_

There are no cave-tunnels near that fountain.

"I'm going," Mike announces.

"Mike -!"

"Aaaahhh!"

Leo lunges forward. On his first step onto the stone flags, Mike sank up to his thigh, right in the solid ground. His other foot is still in the tunnel. Leo grabs Mike's arm and hauls backward.

His first effort is not enough. He tries again, and Mike lifts in impossible slow motion. "Help help help help -" Mike chants, resisting the instinct to plant his hand and push himself up.

Then his foot pulls free, and everything comes back to normal speed, and Mike flies across the tunnel, slamming Leo against the opposite wall.

At least he manages to protect his head this time.

Mike helps him up. "You okay?"

"Yeah." Leo rolls his shoulders. "What about you?"

Mike nods.

"No more windows, okay?" Leo says. "We'll stick to the tunnel."

Mike nods again.

Leo knows he's just taken away Mike's power of direction-picking, but right now it seems like a totally reasonable thing to do.

They keep walking. More windows try to entice them with inviting scenes. Mike, apparently over his stomachache, looks hungrily at a lunch spread on a picnic table, but doesn't move towards it. They ignore a pair of hammocks. They aren't tempted by a comfortable-looking living room. They walk right past the quaint medieval village. They barely look at a desert of rolling dunes.

"Leo, wait!"

Leo doesn't stop. "Come on, Mikey."

"No, Leo, _wait!_"

The urgency in Mike's voice makes Leo halt. He turns back, to see Mike still standing in front of the last window. "What is it?"

"Leo, it's _Donnie!_"

Leo is at his brother's side in an instant, staring out across the red sand hills. "Where?"

"_There!_"

Mike pulls Leo over, and points him at an angle. On the far side of a deep canyon, coming towards them but not yet opposite the window, is Donatello.

"Donnie!" Leo shouts.

Don doesn't look up.

"Donnie!" Mike tries.

Still no response. Don is across from them now, and walking past, oblivious to their presence.

Leo cups his hands around his mouth and bellows at the top of his lungs. "_Donatello!_"

Don doesn't notice.

Leo looks down in frustration. Immediately below the window is a canyon he can't see the bottom of. It's at least forty feet wide, farther than he can jump, even if Mike tries to boost him in the awkwardly low tunnel.

_He can't get to his brother._

"He's getting away!" Mike cries desperately. "He's leaving us! _Donatello!_"

He is _not_ going to let Donatello pass them by. He _isn't_. There must be a way. There must be...

"Throw something," Leo says suddenly.

Mike looks at him like he's lost his mind. "_What?_"

"Throw something!" Leo glances across the canyon. Don is already moving beyond the window, out of their line of sight. "Hurry!"

Mike pats his belt frantically. "I don't have anything!"

Something clicks in Leo's mind. "Throw your phone!"

Mike reaches to his hip, snatches his phone from its pouch, bounces it once in his palm, then winds up and hurls it across the canyon. It's a good throw. The phone hits Don squarely in his shoulder, then drops softly to the sandy ground.

_Ah_, Leo thinks. _They ARE still good for communication._

Don jumps and whirls around, already drawing his bo. He stares across at them in surprise, then looks down with the same expression, as though he hadn't noticed he was walking along the edge of a cliff.

"Donatello!" Leo shouts over the divide. "Go this way!" He points in the direction he and Mike had been travelling, the direction Don had been coming from. "Stay parallel to us! We'll find a way across!"

Don shakes his head. "There's nothing that way!"

Given the fact that Don had just managed to miss two brothers calling urgently for him, Leo isn't too hopeful that Don had been paying much attention to what he'd been walking past. "Go back!" he shouts again.

Don isn't listening. He's looking thoughtfully at his bo, then at the canyon. He looks up, meeting Leo's gaze. "I can vault this!"

"No you can't!" Leo blocks the window with his body, giving Don no place to land. As much as he would _like_ for Don to simply jump across the gap, the distance is too great. An attempt to cross it would only end in disaster. "It's too far!"

Don scoops up Mike's phone and tucks it into his belt, then backs up a pace and raises his bo into a vaulting position. "I can make it! Get out of the way!"

"Don't you dare!" Leo shouts, but Don is already springing forward, planting his bo in the sand and pushing off powerfully. He stretches his long limbs over the chasm, reaching out with his feet, his bo coming up behind him.

Leo gets out of the way, instinctively, but even as he does, he sees that _Don isn't going to make it_.

Don flips over in midair, bringing his arms forward, and in his face Leo can see that Don knows too.

"Mike!" Leo shouts, but Mike is already moving, whipping out his nunchuck, snapping it forward to wrap the chain around Don's bo.

_He's reaching too far._

Leo leaps to grab Mike's arm, to prevent him from pitching over the edge.

_And not far enough._

The nunchuck flails uselessly in Mike's hand.

Don looks up at them, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, caught in a silent scream for help.

And then he falls.

"No!" Mike throws himself at the edge, but Leo holds him, pulls him back, hugs him to his chest.

"Don't look, Mikey. Don't look."

"But -!" Mike struggles, but Leo only holds him tighter. "Leo, he's _dead!_"

"No." Leo squeezes Mike until he stops fighting. "He isn't. He _isn't_. Nothing here is what it seems. He'll be okay, Mike. _He'll be okay._"

Mike pushes away from him, and stares at him with an expression of horror and loss and deep betrayal.

"That might not even have been the real Don," Leo says softly.

Mike's expression intensifies. "How can you _say_ that?" he moans. "Don't you know your own brother?"

"I don't know anything right now," Leo says. He holds out his hand. "Come on. We have to keep moving."

Mike looks at him distrustfully.

"Please, Mike," Leo says. "I need you."

"I can't."

"Yes you can." Leo keeps his hand and his voice steady. "You can do this, Mike. Trust me."

Mike shakes his head. "I can't, Leo. How could -" He looks towards the window. "How could you just _leave_ him?" He takes a step back. "I'm staying, Leo. I'm -" He breaks off, his eyes going to the floor between them.

Leo is about to say something, but a split second later he realizes that Mike is looking at something, and not just lowering his eyes.

He's looking at a raised seam in the floor of the tunnel, the stone seeming to draw together to create a tiny ridge.

In the next instant, the ridge shoots upward. It fills Leo's vision, spreads itself across the passage.

_It cuts him off from his brother._

Leo turns immediately to the window, intending to leap through it, to flip himself around the end of the wall. But just as quickly as the wall rose, it curves and stretches, sealing off the opening and giving Leo no way around.

Leo throws himself at the barrier, scrabbling at it with his hands. Maybe some part of it is not solid; maybe some part will vanish if he presses it. "Mike! Mikey!"

An answering thump from the other side. "Leo! Help me!"

"I'm coming, Mikey!" He claws at the stone, tries to push himself through it, anything to reach his brother.

"Leo, I'm sorry! I didn't mean it! I - _Aaaaahhh!_"

"_Michelangelo!_" He attacks the wall like a wild animal, unable to think of anything else, his entire being focused on getting to the other side, getting to Mike.

He's so focused on that one goal, that he doesn't even notice a shift in the air behind him. He doesn't notice someone watching him as he sinks to the ground, sobbing and softly calling his brother's name. It isn't until he's kneeling there, his palms and forehead pressed against the wall, that he hears someone addressing him.

"Leonardo. You disgrace yourself."

He's on his feet in an instant, his fists clenched, sizing up this enemy who has come to him in his moment of weakness.

The man before him is tall, with piercing eyes behind a strange mask. His long red hair is pulled back, and on one hand he wears a metal glove.

_I know this man._

He ought to. This is the foreign ninja who had once challenged him to a mortal duel, and nearly won by throwing him off a bridge.

What Leo doesn't recognize is the weapon in the ninja's hand. It's a staff, but with a short crosspiece at one end, unlike anything Leo has seen before. Automatically, the back of his brain starts working out the possible and likely uses of this weapon, its strengths and weaknesses, and the best way to counter it.

The tears evaporate from his voice in an instant. "What do you _want?_" he growls.

"What a rude greeting, Leonardo," the man says, as if Leo is a mannerless child who needs to be corrected.

Leo bristles. "You've come at a bad time."

"Forgive me," the man says, but there's no sincerity in it. "Ah, I haven't even introduced myself." He bows, slightly, mockingly. "My name is Ue," he says. "Ue-sama, to you."

"-sama nothing," Leo returns. "_I_ beat _you_, remember?" He turns away, examining the wall more calmly now, his senses still open to what's behind him. "Did you come for a rematch?" He can't resist answering Ue's belittling insult. "Does your _father_ know you're here?"

He turns quickly at Ue's palpable anger, preparing for an attack.

"You impudent weakling!" Ue clenches his metal-covered fist, but doesn't strike. "I am _better_ than you!"

"I seem to recall that's not the case," Leo says. "But you want to fight?" He draws his swords and slides down into an aggressive stance, one smooth motion. "Then come on. Let's fight."

Ue straightens, mastering himself. "I have not come for a rematch," he says, ignoring Leo's offer of battle, answering the earlier question. "I have come to finish the match we have already begun."

Leo narrows his eyes. "What are you talking about? That was over months ago."

"It was a _duel to the death_," Ue says, with a note of triumph. "And I am still alive."

Leo's hands clench on his weapons, as he realizes the implications of his enemy's words.

"The match," Ue says, in a low voice, "is not over."

"You're insane," Leo hisses. "You don't want to do this."

"It is dishonor to us both if the match goes unfinished," Ue says. It's obvious, from his tone, that he believes his own words.

Leo controls his urge to cut the man down where he stands. His own honor demands that he warn him first. "I spared your life once," he says. "If you insist on continuing this, I won't do it again."

"No," Ue says. "You will not have the opportunity." He raises his staff slightly, and again Leo braces for attack. "We will meet in battle soon, Leonardo. Prepare yourself for honorable death."

"I won't lose," Leo spits.

"You will," Ue replies. "Because I have already won."

Leo shifts the angle of his blade. "You have won nothing, except disgrace for your family."

"_I have already won_," Ue repeats. "You simply don't know it yet." He steps back, draws his cape around him, and vanishes in a swirl of purple fabric.

Only his voice lingers behind. "Farewell, Leonardo," it whispers.

Leo holds his pose for a moment, extending his senses, remaining alert for attack. He remembers his battle against Ue, remembers how the alien ninja's teleporting ability makes him a dangerous adversary. But Ue's words, and the silence of the tunnel, convince him that his opponent is not coming back.

He sheathes his swords and rises out of his low stance. "'Already won'?" he says, to the empty passage. "How could he have already won, if I'm still standing here?"

_Donatello, falling down the canyon. _

_Michelangelo, screaming behind a wall. _

_Raphael, walking alone through a tunnel. _

_His brothers._

His heart freezes in his chest.

"Oh, no..."


	10. Ten

Ten

Raph is having a strange experience.

He's in a place he's been to before, and yet he doesn't recognize it.

It _has_ been a while since he's visited these tunnels, but it doesn't seem likely that they could have changed so completely in the intervening time. Anyway, he certainly would have noticed a sewer construction project of that magnitude.

Passages he expects aren't there, and passages he doesn't expect are, and it's very confusing, and it's kind of giving him a headache.

It's kind of like motion sickness. Or, at least, it's like the way people describe motion sickness. Raph wouldn't know. It's not something he's ever suffered from.

Well, he's sure suffering from _something_, right now.

He rubs the throbbing place above his right eye, and keeps walking.

He has to. He won't give up. Sooner or later, he _will_ find the Lair.

_It's always in the last place you look,_ he reminds himself, as he trudges down the passage.

Because after that, you stop looking.

He can't think of a hackneyed phrase for those times when you look everywhere, and _still_ can't find what you're searching for.

_"Over here," Mike said, then jigged a few feet to the right. "No. Over here." _

_Saturday afternoon. Half an hour earlier, they had inquired whether Casey had any old, beat-up blankets, of the sort that he no longer cared whether they acquired a little more dirt or a few more stains. _

_"Yeah, sure," Casey had said, and produced exactly those articles from a horribly musty cabinet in the front room. _

_Raph had coughed away the dust exuding from the cabinet's interior, and asked why disgusting old blankets were taking up prime real estate at the front of the house, when they should have been packed away in some corner of the basement, or maybe thrown out entirely. _

_Casey shrugged. "It's where Gramma kept them." _

_Yeah. Maybe fifty years ago, when they still looked like something a person would want to curl up with. _

_Anyway. For the approximately twenty-five minutes after that, they had been trekking all over the property behind the house, trying to determine the optimal spot to lie down and enjoy a solid hour or two of open-air basking. _

_That is, _Mikey_ was trying to determine the optimal spot. Raph would have been perfectly happy to flop down anywhere, secure in the knowledge that any patch of grass he chose would be about a zillion times better than any of the places where he normally satisfied his body's outrageous craving for all-natural, direct-from-the-source Vitamin D. As far as he was concerned, the difference between "zillion times better" and "optimal" was negligible. Certainly not big enough to justify wasting all this time walking around in search of the latter. His only stipulation was that they pick a place where they couldn't be seen from the farmhouse and its immediate environs. Because, y'know, _basking_. It was just one of those weird turtle-y habits that he didn't want any humans to catch him engaging in. But, since his brothers had the same hang-ups about letting their human friends know about some of their... less-mammalian - tendencies, their first move had been to get well clear of the house. To Raph's eyes, every spot they'd considered in the past fifteen minutes had looked perfectly good. _

_"No, _here_," Raph said, throwing down his blanket exactly where he was. _

_Don and Leo dropped their blankets gratefully, and bent to spread out the corners. _

_Mike looked yearningly at some indeterminate swath of ground, about fifty yards ahead of them. "I think it's better over there." _

_Raph gestured at the place where they were standing. "There's no trees, there's no animal turds, and it's out of sight of the house. What the hell else do you want?" _

_"But the refraction of the light in the air," Mike tried to explain, "and the, um, microclimate, it's very... It's just better over there, okay?" _

_"That's nonsense, Mike," Don said. His voice was muffled, since he was already facedown on the blanket, and rapidly drifting into the zoned-out state that descended upon them whenever they put themselves in the path of sunlight and then stopped moving. _

_"I wanna go over there," Mike said petulantly, flopping the blanket in his arms. _

_"So go," Leo said. "You can have it all to yourself." _

_Mike dithered, but it was obvious that his brothers' not-following-him-around-anymore strategy was working. He never enjoyed having things all to himself nearly as much as he always thought he would. _

_"Well, okay," Mike said, opening his blanket with a deft flip, and letting it settle to the ground. "I'll stay here with you guys. 'Cause if I went over there, to that place that is totally better, then you would be jealous." _

_"Um-hm," Raph said. "You're a selfless person, Mikey." As he settled down onto his own blanket, the bright sun and the wide sky felt good enough that he forgot to wonder about the origin of the reddish-brown stain in the corner of the quilt._

Okay. He is _definitely_ not recognizing these tunnels. If he's been here before, and he's even beginning to doubt himself on _that_ point, then sometime since his last visit a bunch of fairies have come through and scribbled all over the walls.

Raph has the bizarre feeling that he's walking through a three-dimensional book, but one written in an alphabet totally unlike anything he's seen before. The tunnel is covered with thousands, millions, of little characters, arranged in neat columns and rows across the walls and the ceiling and even the floor. The markings are simple, and recurring, very much like a writing system. Like hieroglyphics.

It makes his skin crawl.

And he can't get out. The tunnel has become straight and narrow. He hasn't seen any more brick walls, but he hasn't seen any side passages either. No shafts. No manhole covers.

No _anything_.

He's being driven in a single direction, as surely as if someone was walking behind him, pointing a gun at his back.

And he _doesn't get a choice_.

Wait.

Some of the symbols on the wall, a vertical line of them, are glowing. A word, maybe? A sentence, a magical phrase?

Raph stops to look at them. They remind him of the sewer-sign he and his brothers used to use, to leave messages for each other in their underground world. They had a symbol for _went this way_ and one for _danger ahead_ and one for _need to be alone, don't follow_. Raph had used that symbol a lot, signing it with the symbol for his own name, back in the days when topside was off-limits to them, when privacy was a thing hard to find and jealously guarded.

Being alone is the _last_ thing he wants right now.

He touches the symbols, and the world shivers.

When the images before his eyes settle, the symbols are gone. The walls are plain and bare again, and he's facing not solid concrete but an open doorway.

He goes through.

_This_ is familiar. A normal sewer, and one that he knows. It's a mile or so northeast of the Lair, opposite from how they were approaching at the beginning of this crazy evening.

And, maybe, safely away from the construction.

Or whatever the heck was going on.

Raph doesn't let his hopes rise too high. He simply walks, and concentrates on finding a way home.

* * *

As soon as the wall rises, Mike regrets everything he just said. His only thought is to be reunited with his brother, to be safely with at least one member of his family, so that together they can find the others.

"Leo!" he shouts, throwing himself at the wall. "Help me!"

Leo's voice comes back through the stone. "I'm coming, Mikey!"

Mike is overwhelmed by the feeling that this is all his fault, that his sudden distrust of his eldest brother has somehow manifested as a physical wall between them. "Leo, I'm sorry!" he calls desperately. If his words can build a wall, maybe they can also tear one down. "I didn't mean it! I -"

Something vanishes, but it isn't the wall.

The floor is suddenly gone from beneath his feet, and he's falling, screaming, flailing for something, _anything_, to hold onto.

Then an unseen force wraps around him, slowing his descent, turning him gently upright and setting him on his feet.

He stands there, his arms slightly lifted from his sides, too terrified to move.

He's surrounded by darkness. Only a small circle around him is illuminated, by a bright light shining from above. Then the light too seems to descend, spreading outwards as it flows from the bottom of the shaft, changing itself to fit the shape of the space.

Or, maybe, _making_ the shape of the space.

The light moves like a solid thing, coming down the shaft in a finite blob, bringing darkness behind it. For a moment he is standing in a lit room, with a circle of darkness hanging over him. Then a thin plane of light slides over the opening, and the way back is sealed.

Mike turns his eyes from the ceiling. The light has carved out a low, geometrical space, a little underground room. There are walls - or, at least, edges - and the floor seems sturdy and reliable. Other than that the place is empty, featureless.

"I didn't mean it," Mike whispers.

_Saturday night. Mike sat in the hay in the barn, watching Leo do his sword-dance-thing. He never knew what else to call this thing that Leo did. It wasn't a formal exercise. It wasn't the scripted movements of katas. It wasn't fast, sharp motion, the acting out of an imaginary battle. It was slow, controlled but spontaneous, just Leo bonding with the spirit of his weapons. _

_Mike didn't have anything like this. His own nunchaku didn't allow for this mindful, meditative kind of use, this half-speed harmony of weapon and warrior. They were either lifeless, hanging limply from his hands, or spinning with furious energy. There was nothing in between. _

_"You must think I'm so stupid," Leo said. He was still facing the other way, hadn't broken the rhythm of his dance. If there had been anyone else around, Mike would have thought Leo wasn't talking to _him_. _

_"What?" he said blankly. _

_"There's truth in art," Leo said, executing a broad sweep. His blade flashed in the dim light. _

_Mike watched his brother for a moment, trying to figure out what he was talking about. "What, you mean the cartoon?" _

_Leo nodded. It was almost lost in the continuous circular flow of his exercise. _

_"Dude, seriously," Mike said. "It was just something I read, and I drew a picture to go with it. I didn't _mean_ anything..." _

_"You've always been better than me," Leo said. His tone was completely calm, so Mike couldn't judge how the fact, or the admission of it, made him feel. "How do you _do_ it?" _

_"Uh..." Mike shifted in the straw. "Which 'it' are we talking about?" _

_"Your reactions," Leo said, and Mike had the sense that Leo's thoughts were as smooth and unbroken as his movements, only somewhat less visible. "They're not only faster... they're _better_. You always just _know_ what to do." _

_"I don't _know_ anything," Mike said. The quasi-praise made him uncomfortable. "I just _do_. Then I look down, and I say, 'Am I still alive?', and I am, and I keep going." _

_Leo shook his head. "You have the devil's luck, Mikey." _

_Mike lay back in the straw, folding his arms behind his head and grinning at the rafters. "Yeah, I know." He heard the familiar sound of a blade sliding into a leather sheath, and then Leo was sitting beside him. _

_"How do you put up with me?" Leo asked. _

_Mike turned his head to smile up at his brother. "Just naturally talented, I guess." _

_Leo looked at him in surprise for a moment, then smiled back. "You're a gift, Mikey," he said. "Don't ever change." _

_"I try," Mike said, making the accompanying sigh as dramatic as possible. "But every day I wake up and I'm a little more awesome than the day before." _

_Leo laughed, then patted Mike's knee as he got to his feet. "I'm going back to the house," he said. "Are you coming?" _

_"Nah," Mike said, from his position reclining in the hay. "I'll hang out for a while." _

_"Okay." Leo stretched his arms above his head. "If I don't see you when you come in, then I'll see you in the morning." _

_"Night, bro." _

_"Night."_

And Mike just stays there, willing the prison of light to release him, to give him back his brother.

The brother that he loves.

No matter what.

* * *

Leo advances warily down the passage, trying to figure out how many problems he's facing.

Is it a chemical spill, a construction project, a mysterious outpost of the underground city, _and_ the sudden return of a crazed alien warrior? Or are they all connected somehow?

Leo frowns. The Daimyo had magic, was able to move and change objects by some mystic ability. Was it possible that his son, too, had those gifts?

And, then, had this whole evening been nothing but the twisted game of a disgraced warrior bent on revenge? Only an attempt to tire Leonardo, to get him weak and alone, so that he could be defeated in combat?

_Why doesn't he just kill me by magic? If he's really in control of everything that's happened tonight, he's had more than enough opportunities._

Ue wouldn't think that way, though, Leo realizes. He had his own code of honor, and it obviously didn't permit striking down enemies by magic cast from a safe distance.

Using magic to _weaken_ an enemy, though, and then ambushing them when they were exhausted, disoriented, and off-guard, was apparently well within the bounds of Ue's bizarre version of Bushido.

And Leo does not like it one bit.

On the other hand, it makes Leo feel a little better about the safety of his brothers. Ue's honor compelled him to challenge the most powerful warriors, and he had singled out Leonardo as the worthiest adversary on Earth. On his first visit, he had shown absolutely no interest in the other Turtles, refusing to fight them even when they stood between him and his desired opponent.

Then again, it seemed like Ue was willing to do anything to get into a position where he could defeat Leonardo in this pseudo-honorable kind of combat. If he thought that harming Leonardo's brothers would increase his own chances of ultimate victory, he just might be willing to do it.

He might think he was _required_ to do it.

Leo grits his teeth and walks faster.

What if Ue was _not_ controlling the maze Leo was trapped in? What if he was only lucky enough to make his return at a time when Leonardo happened to be vulnerable? What if he had been watching, waiting for such a moment?

What if all these bizarre occurrences were _exactly_ as they seemed, and Ue was just one more factor making a terrible situation even worse?

In that case, the fates of his brothers depended not on the whims of a more-or-less rational being, but only on circumstance and their own abilities.

Whether Donatello is alive or dead right now depends on how deep the canyon was, what lay at the bottom, and whether Don had been able to catch himself before he hit the ground.

Leo can't even decide which of these possibilities he hates the most.

He forces himself to greater speed.

He had been on the 'far' side of the wall when it rose. While Mike had been trapped in the part of the tunnel they had already explored, Leo had found himself in new territory, unknown ground. A thorough exploration had convinced him that there was no way to get back to Mike, and he had had no choice but to turn and walk away from the place where he had last seen his brother.

_Two_ of his brothers.

Mike's scream is ringing in his blood, and Don's face as he fell is frozen in his mind.

He will find them.

He _will_.

Dead or alive, he will bring them home.

The passage ends.

Not in a wall, but in a door.

Leo puts his hand on the knob.

* * *

Once again, something opens.

Mike cringes reflexively, raising his hands and squeezing his eyes closed.

"Mikey!"

Mike opens his eyes, and the next thing he knows he's wrapped in his brother's familiar arms, and it's the first thing in a long time that feels _real_.

"Leo..." He buries his face in his brother's neck. "Leo, I'm sorry..."

"It's okay," Leo says fiercely. "It's okay." He releases his grip. Mike has the dizzying sensation that the whole world has fallen away from him. He sways dangerously, and then Leo's hands are on his shoulders, grounding him.

"Mikey."

Mike makes his eyes focus. He scans Leo's face desperately, memorizing every detail, saving it alongside every other memory of his oldest brother, just in case this is the last one he ever gets to make.

Leo is looking at him with concern. "Mikey," he says again. "Are you all right?"

"I am now," Mike says shakily. He finally tears his eyes from his brother's face, and flicks his gaze around the room. "How did you get in?"

Leo tilts his head slightly, gesturing over his shoulder. "There was a door."

"No," Mike says softly. "There wasn't."

And there isn't. Whatever entrance Leo used to get into this room, it's gone now.

Leo glances back, then returns his focus to his brother. "It doesn't matter. Mikey - tell me what you know about Ue."

Mike blinks. "Who?"

Leo squeezes his shoulders a little tighter. "That ninja who challenged me to a duel," he says. "Tall, wears a mask and a glove. Do you remember? We were eating ice cream..."

Mike's mind reels, and the room seems to tilt again. "Leo, why? What..."

"Mike, please." There's something frightening in Leo's voice. Possessed. Mike can't form a reply.

"Mikey." Another squeeze. "He's here. I need you to tell me who he _is_."

"I -" Mike tries to force his mind back to that night, not because he understands Leo's request, but because he needs to do as his brother tells him, to give him the information he wants. "I don't know. I barely saw him. He was fighting _you_."

Leo's eyes tick back and forth, searching Mike's face. "What about on the bridge? I fell off; he was still up there with you. Did he say anything?"

"He -" Mike can't remember. "I don't know. I wasn't listening. You were _falling off a bridge_."

"Mikey, focus!" Leo's voice is rising. "What did he _say?_"

"He said -" Mike squeezes his eyes shut again, letting the images come back. The alien warrior, gloating, while Leo _fell_... "He called himself the Ultimate Warrior. And the Ultimate Ninja." The words come back to him. Part of his mind _was_ listening, even as his heart stopped. He's more sure now of his own memories. "Pretty much he said he was the most awesome guy ever."

"And did he have a staff?" Leo presses. "Another weapon?"

"No," Mike says, then again, more confidently: "No."

"Is there anything else?" Leo's gaze burns into Mike's eyes, as though he's trying to see Mike's memories for himself, search them directly for whatever he needs to know. "Anything you can remember."

"I -" Mike starts, but then there's a blazing light behind Leo's head and he has to look away.

"Leonardo." A voice he doesn't recognize. "I'm disappointed."

Mike stumbles backwards. Someone is pushing him... No. Leo is _guarding_ him, moving him bodily to a more defensible position.

"What do you want?" Leo growls.

"Asking for help?" the voice says, instead of answering the question. "Cowardly. _Weak_."

Mike forces one eye open. Just as Leo said, the ninja with the red mask is here with them, watching them with arms folded and a strange staff in his hand.

"We told you the first time," Leo says coldly. "We don't fight alone."

The masked ninja raises an eyebrow. "Your brother does not look so willing to fight."

"I didn't ask him to," Leo says. He opens his stance to provide better cover for Mike, angling his swords to either side.

But Mike dodges around his arm, moving to Leo's side and drawing his own weapons. The other ninja's easy dismissal of him makes him furious. He _doesn't_ let his brothers fight alone.

Not when he's there to fight with them.

"I don't need an invitation," he says, and snaps his nunchaku into motion.

The Ultimate Warrior - Ue - looks at him with evident disdain. "Interesting."

The room tilts.

Mike holds his focus through the nauseating shift, doesn't lose the rhythm of his weapons. He doesn't take his eyes off of Ue, either, only scanning his new surroundings with his peripheral vision. It's another tunnel.

_Narrow_, his mind whispers. _Bad for maneuvering. Get early advantage, make him defend._

He leaps forward, nunchaku whirling.

But his attack never connects. He simply freezes in midair, just out of reach of his enemy.

He snarls furiously, tries to strike out with his weapons, but the invisible force holds him fast.

"This is single combat," Ue informs him.

"Then bring it!" he rages.

"Not for you," Ue says calmly. "Leonardo and I will duel. When it is over, someone will come for you."

Then Ue vanishes. The invisible force goes with him, and Michelangelo is dropped unceremoniously to the floor. He scrambles back to his feet, his weapons still clenched in his hands.

"You're dead, Ue!" he screams to the empty tunnel. "If Leo doesn't kill you, _I will!_"


	11. Eleven

Eleven

Leonardo holds his position.

He's sure now that Ue is responsible for everything that's happened tonight, and he's _not_ going to play this twisted game anymore. He will fight _here_, on _this_ ground, or not at all.

He will wait.

He doesn't wait long. Ue returns, alone, in a swirl of purple cloak.

"Where is Michelangelo?" Leo asks steadily.

"He is elsewhere," Ue replies carelessly.

"Obviously." Leonardo brings his swords forward, pointing them at his enemy. "Bring him back."

"You must fight alone, Leonardo," Ue says, as though Leo were so stupid he had forgotten the foremost rule of their combat.

"You want to fight?" Leo sinks lower in his stance. "Then let's fight. But _don't_ take my family from me."

"They have made it clear that they will not let you enter battle alone," Ue says, in the bored, mildly aggravated tone of one who is haggling over details.

"They'll stand down if I tell them to," Leo says, keeping his voice as steady as he can. He's not entirely sure that they _would_. But it's the only card he has to play.

"Very well," Ue says. He seems to care little _what_ Leo does, and he does not appear in any hurry to actually engage in combat. "Find your brothers. Then we will duel." He gestures lazily, and a door appears in one of the walls. "Your path lies this way."

Leo doesn't believe for an instant that what's beyond the door will lead him directly to his brothers, or to anywhere else he'd like to be. He doesn't move.

Ue shrugs. "Go, or do not go," he says. "I will give you some time."

Then he vanishes.

Leo holds his pose a moment longer, then straightens, sheathes his swords, and strides to the door. For now, he will have to play the game. This might be another trick, just a ploy to get him to run in circles a while longer, but if there is any possibility that he might be reunited with his brothers, then he will go.

He will be fighting for his life before the night is out. He will not face his death knowing that he didn't do everything in his power to keep his family together.

He can't quit the game. He doesn't know if he can beat it. But he can play it with every particle of his being, and never, ever stop trying to win.

Leo opens the door, and stalks out into the tunnel beyond.

* * *

Mike moves cautiously down the narrow passage.

It's only been twenty minutes, but already his rage has dissipated, and once again he's lost and alone and directionless.

Bloodlust isn't something he experiences often. It's not a feeling he holds onto. It's not a feeling he would _want_ to hold onto. But right now, he wishes he had it back. Without it he feels empty, devoid of animating energy.

He still _wants_ something, to be sure. He wants to find his brothers, to know they're safe. But he doesn't know where they are or how to get to them, and the spider web of tunnels he's been walking through for the past twenty minutes only drains him and makes him feel hopeless.

_Leo wouldn't feel like this. He'd come after us like a freight train. Every minute he didn't find us would only make him try harder._

Mike peers down a side passage. It's barely wide enough to admit him, and there's no way of knowing where it leads. The prospect of turning, and getting more lost than he already is, makes him feel dizzy. He steadies himself against the wall, double-checks to be sure he's facing the way he thinks he is, and continues down the main tunnel.

_I'm not Leo._

"You're useless," he berates himself. "What a baby. Always waiting for somebody else to rescue _you_."

"That's not true," he replies to himself, a moment later. "Who rescued his bros in the underground city? Who got that key from the Triceraton guards, while puking his guts out? Who got himself inducted into the _Justice Force?_ Yeah, that's right! _I_ did!"

The pep talk renews his confidence, and he looks around with increased energy, taking stock of his surroundings.

His very, very nondescript surroundings.

_You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike._

"Oh, very funny," Mike mutters at the obnoxious voice in his head. Still, he can't resist adding, "Xyzzy Lair."

_Nothing happens._

"Damn."

He keeps walking, careful not to bump his head or scrape his shoulders against the walls and ceiling of the tiny passage.

* * *

Raphael heads down another of the eastern tunnels. He's explored a lot of them already, and, just like the ones to the west of the Lair, every single one has been a dud.

His strategy is simple: follow the tunnel whose general direction would seem to lead him towards that flashing dot in his head, the one that marks his home.

His strategy is also not working.

Some tunnels get promisingly close to the Lair, but so far every one has veered off, doubled back, or terminated abruptly in a dead end. He marks each turnoff in his mind as he tries it, imagines a big red X over each opening as the passage beyond proves to be useless. Over and over he backtracks and starts again with the next most likely tunnel.

He's walked for hours, for miles, in this new area, and he doesn't seem to be getting any closer to his goal. He's long since given up the careful, sliding step for moving silently through shallow water, stopped bothering with it even before he had returned to where his brothers should have been waiting for him. He's just been splashing as he goes, his irritation coming out in the form of leaping drops. It doesn't matter. He hasn't seen a single living thing larger than a rat since he left his brothers at that first junction.

These tunnels are making his headache worse. He's pretty sure they're spatially impossible, that the twisting passages should be intersecting with one another in more places than they actually do.

He trusts his mental maps.

But, when it gets right down to it, he trusts the laws of matter more.

He turns a corner, and finds another dead end.

"_Damn_ it!"

He punches the wall, his frustration coming out in a shivering fall of brick dust and a satisfying pain in his knuckles.

The wall remains resolutely solid.

He backtracks.

He doesn't like the way this part of his night is going. It had seemed promising at first, a whole new section of tunnels, some miles distant from the area he'd already exhausted the possibilities of.

But it's just as rearranged, just as closed off, as those other passages, and, unlike the first maze of dead ends, it's becoming increasingly _hostile_.

As he works further down the tunnels, he's sure they're getting narrower. The ceiling is pressing down on him, lower with every new section of sewer. And other than the steadily diminishing size of the passages, there's absolutely nothing to distinguish one from another.

_Nothing._

He's keeping track of his progress by brute force now, by sheer motor memory. Distance, direction, relative locations in space. He can't trust visual clues anymore.

And he's becoming increasingly worried about the reliability of his positional sense, because these tunnels are _just not possible_.

He's _never_ wrong about where things are in relation to one another. Not even when his brothers test his abilities, purposely getting him lost in the most confusing areas of the sewers, to see whether he can find his way out again. How could his spatial instinct have gotten so far off-kilter?

The tunnel narrows again. He turns sideways, and forces himself through.

He's not going back. He'll find the Lair, or die trying.

He tries not to think about the relative likelihoods of those two choices.

* * *

Donatello wakes up, but he doesn't open his eyes. The bed is too comfortable, and he's in that state of fading sleep-paralysis where he knows he should move, but he doesn't want to because it would break the spell.

_Just a few more minutes..._

He'd been having such a strange dream, too. The sense of it lingers translucently in his mind. Maybe, if he lies very still, the images will come back.

A river. A canyon. He'd dreamed about... travelling? That made sense. He _had_ just come back from a weekend away.

He sighs contentedly, and enjoys the feeling of the warm blankets all around him.

_Okay. I'm getting up. Vacation is over; Master Splinter will be expecting us for training._

He gives himself another thirty seconds, and then he forces himself to open his eyes.

_Wait a minute._

This isn't his room. Nor is it the attic of the farmhouse, or any other place he expects to wake up. He turns his eyes slowly, scanning the room, trying to figure out where he is.

It doesn't look immediately threatening. The room is cool and dimly lit, as he would expect a bedroom to be. He can't see the furniture too clearly, but it looks ordinary, not like torture devices concealed by shadows. Cautious movement of his limbs proves that it's only the weight of sleep holding him down, and not drugs or restraining devices.

_But where AM I?_

He draws his arm up from under the blankets, reaches for the bedside lamp, and pulls the chain dangling from beneath the shade. A soft light clicks on, and he blinks to clear his eyes.

The furniture is ordinary indeed. Nice, even. A table to one side is laden with covered dishes, and his own gear is stacked neatly on a chair.

_O... kay..._ he thinks slowly. _Definitely don't remember getting undressed in a place like this..._

He pushes the blankets off and sits up, rubbing his head before he stands. The carpet is very pleasant under his feet.

He moves to the chair, turns on the tall reading lamp, and catalogs his gear as he puts it on. Everything seems to be accounted for, right down to the second shell-cell and the stub of pencil. The unusual additions to his equipment trigger memories.

_Were those REAL?_

If they were, he can't figure out how they tie in to his present circumstances. The last thing he remembers is an endless desert, a canyon, his brother's faces...

He frowns. Something is missing. The _where_ and the _who_ feel right, but the _when_ and the _why_ are escaping him.

He knots his bandana behind his head, leaves his bo leaning against the chair, and goes to inspect the dishes on the table.

Under the silver lids is the most fantastic breakfast he's ever seen. Better even than the results of Mike and April's collaborative effort at the farmhouse. Eggs and oatmeal and pancakes and sausage and French toast _and_ an amazing-looking coffee cake.

Something, though - maybe the strange holes in his memory, maybe the absolute unfamiliarity of this place - makes him distrust the food, and he replaces the covers without taking a thing.

There are three doors leading off this room. One of them is a sliding door, obviously a closet. Don picks up his bo, slides it into its place behind his shell, and tries the second door.

It's a bathroom.

He backs out and tries the third door.

This one opens directly to the outside. Don stares at the unbelievable vista, and tries to figure out when everything stopped making sense.

_Sunday morning. Don stood on the porch of the farmhouse, his stomach groaning from Mike and April's combined determination to feed everyone until they exploded. Casey had told all of them to "get over it", as he was going to be providing an equally outrageous amount of food for dinner. Don was contemplating burning off the bloated feeling with a morning run, but most of him just wanted to lie down somewhere and moan quietly for a while. _

_He became aware of another presence on the porch. _

_"April," he said, a carefully polite greeting. _

_"Don," she replied, in the same cautious tone. No "Donnie" this morning, affectionately calling him like the little brother she'd never had. She'd barely addressed him at all during breakfast, only looking at him to assiduously pass another plate of food. _

_He didn't say anything. She had just as much right to the porch as he did. He was going to be leaving in a minute anyway. It was only a question of whether it would be into the woods, for a run, or back to the house, for some of that curling up in a ball that sounded so good right now. _

_"I'm - sorry about last night," April said. _

_Don shifted awkwardly. "It's all right." _

_"No," April said. "It isn't. I -" _

_"Really," Don said, trying to head her off. He would honestly rather have just forgotten the whole thing. But April plowed on, ignoring him, spilling out words. _

_"It wasn't about you," she said. "It was only because - I was taught that it's disrespectful to look at people when they're not wearing any clothes." She paused, fidgeted. "Which made things really awkward when I first met you guys." _

_Don cringed. April's first reaction to him was another thing he would have liked to forget. _

_"Then I sort of started pretending that you _were_ wearing clothes," April went on, "but then when I saw you not wearing _anything_ I just went -" She waved her hand at the side of her head, and made a funny noise with her lips. "Which was completely stupid, and I'm sorry." She shifted, and looked embarrassed. "And now I'm rambling. But I just wanted you to know, it wasn't about _you_ at all." _

_"It's fine, April," Don mumbled, keeping his head down. He was sure his face was turning bright red. This had to be the most mutually embarrassing apology ever. _

_"No," she said. "Don - please. If it's not fine, you can say so." _

_He sighed, and looked out over the yard. "It's okay," he said. "Really." _

_"I don't know why it should be," she said miserably. "That was really awful of me. You get that from everybody else. I'm supposed to be your _friend_. You shouldn't have to get it from me too." _

_"No, April -" He turned back to her, no longer caring what color his face was. "That's the _point_. You're _not_ everybody else. Other people react to - what we are, and then they don't stick around to give us a second chance. You did. And -" He lowered his gaze. "I can't thank you enough for that." _

_"Oh, Donnie," she said, her voice thick. "I don't -" _

_"You're a good friend, April," he said quietly. "We don't expect you to be a _perfect_ friend. We - know we're not easy people to be friends _with_." _

_"Anybody would be lucky to have you as a friend," she replied fiercely. Then her demeanor turned inwards again. "Donnie... do you mind if I... ?" _

_He frowned. "What?" _

_Instead of finishing the question, she leaned forward, resting one hand on his bent arm. When he didn't pull away, she brushed a gentle kiss against his cheek. "Thank you for giving me a second chance," she whispered. _

_Don tried to control the blood rushing to his face. _

_He failed. _

_But he didn't care._

Don doesn't know how he managed to become friends with such an amazing woman, and he doesn't know why he seems to have spent the night in a hotel room built into the solid rock of a canyon wall.

The third door opens onto the canyon floor. Peering out, Don can see that the door is flush with the cliff face when it's closed. No other features give away the existence of the tastefully-appointed room within.

He moves cautiously from the thick carpet to the layer of rough sand lying over the stone of the canyon floor. He closes the door behind him, and it virtually disappears, blending perfectly into the reddish rock.

_Now what?_

He starts walking.

* * *

Ue paces back and forth in the deep chamber he's adopted as his war room. He has no intention at all of letting Leonardo reunite with his brothers. The other Turtle ninjas are nothing but a nuisance, preventing Leonardo from entering single combat with full willingness both to kill and to die. If Leonardo's brothers are present during the duel, they will not let him fight alone, and if they are not, then Leonardo will not be able to focus wholly on the battle, to invest his entire spirit in the mortal challenge.

It would not be satisfying.

He has been more than generous. He has offered the other Turtles food and rest, diversion and entertainment of every kind. He has not let them come to any harm. He has even arranged the magic so that, in the unlikely event that Leonardo should defeat him in battle, the other Turtles would instantly find themselves safely at home.

And still Leonardo seems unable to turn his thoughts to the mortal duel. Instead of preparing for combat, instead of even realizing that he had been challenged, he has invested all of his energy in seeking and protecting his family, in trying to bring them home.

"_More_ than generous," Ue snarls to himself. He had been surprised, when he had first spoken to Leonardo, to realize that the Turtle had not been aware of his opponent's presence. After that he had allowed Leonardo to see his brother again, to say farewell to him. And what had Leonardo done?

"Ask for help!" Ue growls. "For _help!_"

It seemed that the knowledge of what he was facing did nothing to turn Leonardo's spirit towards battle, and only made him more determined to bring his brothers together, and remain by their side.

Ue strikes his fist into his gloved palm.

Even letting Leonardo _think_ he would see his brothers again was a mistake. The other Turtles had to be removed. He had to make Leonardo truly alone, so that his only possibilities for happiness would lie in revenge and in joining his brothers in death. Only then would Leonardo fight for _himself_, as a true warrior.

Only then would there be glory in his victory - or in his defeat, if Leonardo should prove to be the stronger.

But how to dispose of the others? Not by combat. It would be dishonorable to pit himself against an obviously inferior warrior. But not by magical strength, either - that would be an insult to their lesser, but still respectable, skills as ninja.

He will do it via an intermediary. A champion, skilled enough to defeat the Turtles, but not so powerful as to make the battle unfair.

Ue reaches his ungloved hand into a pouch hanging at his belt, and scoops a measure of green dust into his palm. He draws his hand from the pouch, looks at the powder a moment, and curls his fingers into a fist. Then, raising his fist to his mouth, he blows softly into the small hole between thumb and forefinger.

When he's emptied his lungs into the hollow of his hand, he pauses briefly, then dashes the powder to the ground, immediately lifting his open hand again, like a puppeteer holding strings. The dust rises under his palm, assuming a form.

"Find my enemies," Ue orders. "Destroy them."

The golem bows. "Yes, Master," it rasps.


	12. Twelve

Twelve

Donatello looks up as he walks.

The canyon is narrow and deep and very long. The walls are striped in gentle undulations of orange and red and tan, layers revealed by eons of wind erosion. It looks very much like pictures he's seen of the American West.

(Internet, again. He's quite the computer-chair traveller.)

He looks up partly because it's beautiful, the warm vibrant colors under a thin ribbon of blue sky, but also because that's where the way out is going to be. He's looking for a place where happenstance erosion has left him a natural ladder. So far, everything has been just a little too smooth for him to climb up.

_If I had my gear..._

He sighs. He'd left shuko spikes and grappling hook at home, not expecting that his weekend away would involve rock-climbing.

_I really should learn to expect the unexpected._

If nothing else, his experience of his surroundings has been much more... continuous, since he woke up. There haven't been any bizarre skips of attention, or sudden translocations to increasingly weird environments.

It makes him a little nervous about what he thinks he remembers.

If all of that was a dream, where time and distance never make sense anyway, then how did he get to where he is now? And if it was real, then...

The memory of Leo and Mike's faces as they reached for him has only become clearer since he first awoke with the vague idea of it lingering in his mind.

_What do they think happened to me? What happened to THEM?_

He concentrates on the images, trying to fully reconstruct them.

_He had been walking through the endless desert. There had been a sudden sharp touch on his shoulder. He had turned, and the desert abruptly had an edge. The rolling dunes ended at the lip of a deep slot canyon, the other side of which was much higher than the level he stood on. There had been a window in the cliff face opposite, opening onto some kind of tunnel, and his brothers had been standing there, calling him. _

_He had looked swiftly at the canyon, at the window, and known that he could make it. The window was low, but not impossibly so, and the gap was only about twenty-five feet. Leo had..._

He frowns, and the memory of what had happened next reforms in his mind.

_Leo had told him it was too far, but that was ridiculous. He had made longer jumps. Not from sand, to be sure, but the footing was solid enough and he could get a decent launch off it. He'd spotted the jump once more, made his vault, and..._

He picks at the memory, and the images play out slowly.

_The canyon had seemed to stretch. As fast as he was flying over it, the opposite side was drawing away with equal speed. He was trapped, frozen in the middle. He had stretched desperately... Mikey had reached back for him..._

...and then their _faces_, horrified, disbelieving, and every moment now being etched more deeply into his brain.

He'll never forget.

_I have to find them._

He stops abruptly.

He's found... something.

It had been completely invisible from just two steps back, but now he's staring at a narrow recess in the canyon wall. It's not a ladder.

It's a staircase.

The steps are steep and shallow, but every one is cut a little more deeply into the cliff face, so that the staircase goes back and back, up and up, all the way to the plain above.

For a moment, Don just stands there, scratching his head.

And then he puts his foot on the first step of the stairway to the sky.

_It had felt like flying, Sunday morning, and it had ended with a crash. _

_Shortly after April kissed him, he departed hastily to burn off more than one kind of feeling on a run through the woods. _

_It really wasn't _April_ he was mad at, he thought as he weaved between the trees. It was just that, in that one unthinking reaction, she had reminded him of all the things he would never have. _

_There was nothing wrong with _him_. The only thing standing between himself and a full, normal life was other people's prejudices. _

_It was an understanding he was still coming to terms with. _

_He was rarely able to go out in daylight. He couldn't enter public places. And he would never truly be a member of the scientific community, because the people who ought to be his colleagues and collaborators would only ever be his tormentors, seeing him as nothing more than an experiment. _

_He launched himself into the air, springing up the boughs of a tall pine tree. At the top, he leaped to the next tree, and then the next, finding his footing on high branches, virtually running on air as he skimmed across the roof of the forest. _

On the other hand,_ he thought, _how many NORMAL people get to do THIS?

_He came to a stop, finally, landing on a sturdy branch in a controlled crouch, finding his still-balance before rising to his feet. He surveyed the wide valley with a sense of deep satisfaction. _

This, at least, is mine. My friends have given it to me.

_He raised his face to the blue vault of the sky, and thought he might just stay up there a while longer._

The staircase is steep, but somehow not as tall as it looks, and Don finds himself rather suddenly at the top of it.

He's a good distance from the cliff's edge, having traveled diagonally up through the wall. He briefly considers going back to look down at it, but then dismisses the thought, deciding he would be perfectly happy if he never saw it again.

All he really wants to see is his brothers, with different expressions on their faces.

He goes forward. He's walking in sand again, still red, but without the dunes he traversed earlier.

A dark circle some distance ahead, an indistinguishable object lying on the ground, catches his eye, and he advances towards it.

No. It's not _on_ the ground. It's _in_ the ground.

He stops.

It's a manhole cover. And, mysteriously, there is not a single grain of sand on it.

"Where _am_ I?" he whispers.

Then he lifts the cover, and drops down into strangely familiar sewers.

* * *

Mike takes a minute to rest against the wall.

Against both walls, really. The tunnel is so narrow that when he leans his back against one side of it, and sticks his legs out to brace himself, his toes jam up against the other side.

He's done. He's just _done_. He's been walking _forever_ in these tunnels, just blindly trying to follow the one he's picked out as the "main" passage. It's hard, though, because there are twists and forks and sometimes there's a twist _and_ a fork at the same time, and he can't tell which branch is the one he's been following and which is the turnoff.

And none of them seem to lead anywhere.

It's hopeless, and he doesn't think he's ever been this tired in his _life_.

Then there's a sound from around the next curve, someone coming from the direction he had been going, and he finds he's not too tired to grab his nunchaku and slide into a fighting stance.

"Who's there?" he demands.

A pause. Then: "_Mikey?_"

Mike holsters his weapons hastily as Raphael appears from behind the twist. "Oh man," he says, relief spilling from him in waves. "Am I glad to see _you._"

Raph looks him over with a gaze that misses nothing and forgives less. "Are you okay? Where are Don an' Leo?"

"I don't know." Mike moves forward, needing physical closeness with whichever brother he _does_ know the whereabouts of. "What about you? Are you okay?"

"'m fine," Raph says shortly, but he lets Mikey touch him, lets him have the reassurance of contact.

"Did you find the Lair?" Mike asks.

Raph shakes his head. "No."

"But you're not lost, are you?" Mike asks anxiously. "Your compass-thingy is still working?"

"Yeah, o' course." Raph points over Mike's shoulder. "Listen, we gotta go that way. Turn around."

"But..." Mike hesitates. "Don and Leo..."

"Sure as hell ain't back there," Raph says, jerking a thumb over his own shoulder. He relents at Mikey's widening eyes. "Trust me, bro. If they were, I woulda found 'em." He points again in the opposite direction. "We gotta go that way."

Mike just shakes his head. "No, they're not there either. I've just _come_ from there."

"Mikey," Raph says sharply. "I'm tellin' you, we gotta go that way. _Turn around._"

Mike's eyes start to fill with tears. "You don't understand, Raph," he says. "Donnie, he... the canyon, and then Leo..."

"_Mikey,_" Raph says again. "You're not makin' any sense."

Mike sniffles and tries to wipe his eyes with the back of his hand. "We gotta find them, Raph."

"We will," Raph says. "We _will_, Mikey. But I promise you, hundred percent, they are _not_ back there." He grips Mike's arms firmly. "We're gonna find 'em, bro. But you gotta pull yourself together and start walkin'."

"Okay." Mike sniffles again, trying to choke back the tears. "Okay."

Raph smiles at him. "That's my lil' bro." He releases Mike, with a little push in the right direction. "Now tell me everything, okay? I ain't seen anybody since I first left you guys."

Mike turns, and starts walking. It would make more sense for Raph to go first, but the tunnel is too narrow for him to pass, so Mike will just have to take the lead and trust Raph to guide him from behind. "It..." He takes a deep breath and goes back to the beginning. "Leo went to scout the lower tunnels. Then Don and I said, 'Hey, we can get out through the first manhole.' So we went there. But it was no good. So we went back. But Donnie, he disappeared! Then Leo came back, and we went looking for Donnie, and there was this weird cave? And then -"

The next thing Mike knows, he's flattening himself to the floor, and Raph is sailing over his head, sai outstretched, to land in a three-point crouch several yards down the tunnel.

"What the shell?" Mike squeaks, his voice rising two octaves. "Are you out of your _mind?_"

Raph rises and turns, wordlessly, leering at Mike with narrowed eyes.

Mike jumps to his feet and backs away, raising his hands to protect himself. "If you wanted to go first," he says nervously, "you coulda just said so..."

Raph only advances on him, his sai at the ready. Then he leaps, and Mike is on the floor again, sliding on his shell to avoid Raph's downward strike.

"Raph!" he screams, as he scrambles back to his feet. "It's _me!_"

Then he's busy moving, writhing his body to avoid a flurry of slashing strikes. A driving attack has him hopping backwards out of range.

"Oh, crap," he says aloud, as he skids to a stop. "You're not Raph."

The thing that isn't Raph ignores the accusation. It just comes at him again, still in eerie silence.

This time Mike brings his weapons into play. He aims first for the not-Raph's sai, ensnaring them and yanking them from not-Raph's hands, whipping them around his own sides to clatter away down the tunnel.

Not-Raph backs off a pace at this development, and Mike catches the spinning ends of his nunchaku. "Raph?" he says cautiously.

_Please be a horrible mistake. Please be a horrible mistake._

Then the other Turtle is attacking him again, striking with fists and feet, and Mike just focuses on holding his ground, on not letting this shade of his brother reach the discarded weapons.

When he sees his opening, Mike counterstrikes. He targets the not-Raph's plastron, controlling his attacks so they won't shatter the bony plating. This still might be his brother, under some kind of mind control, and he fights only to disable.

The assault on his chest and stomach barely slows the maybe-Raph down. He just keeps coming, still silent. Not even a snarl escapes his lips.

And that's how Mike knows.

This is _not_ Raph. No amount of mind control could prevent Raph from growling when the rage of battle came over him.

Mike renews his attack, fury filling him at this creature that has dared to think it could deceive him. His strikes are harder now, driving the imposter back relentlessly.

"_You_," he screams, "- are not -" a crushing blow to the elbow "- my -" a matching strike to the opposite shoulder "- brother!"

Mike lunges forward, lashing out at the not-Raph's head.

His attack connects.

But instead of the crunch of bones, instead of a spray of blood, there's only a cloud of green dust, floating upwards in the vortex of his nunchaku.

He freezes.

His weapons spin slowly to a stop.

"Oh, _crap_," he whispers.

And then he's running like hell, away from the dust that settles slowly in the silent passage.

* * *

The water-mirror shatters, the shards pattering to the floor as crystal drops.

"_WHAT?!_"

The roar echoes through the chamber.

Ue clenches the hand that had been supporting the water-mirror, his mailed fingers scraping against his metal-clad palm.

How could the Turtle have defeated his champion? It was impossible. Leonardo's brothers were _weak_, they were _nothing_.

Ue masters himself, forces his fingers to uncurl.

Obviously, he was mistaken about the skill of the other Turtle ninjas. Especially about that of the one who wielded nunchaku.

A contradiction, that one. Ue had never seen a warrior who cried so much, who was so ruled by the weak emotions, and yet who could fight with such competence.

A puzzle, to be sure.

But still not a worthy opponent.

Ue reaches his hand into his pouch, intending to draw out another palmful of dust, to fashion it into a more powerful champion. But when he takes his hand from the cloth bag, it is empty.

"No," he says softly.

Destroying the other Turtles might give him the result he wants, but it still would not be satisfying.

If Leonardo is truly the adversary he is destined to challenge, then the Earth ninja will prepare himself correctly for battle, regardless of where his brothers are.

Ue consciously forces the tension from his shoulders.

He will be patient.

He will not intervene.

He will give Leonardo some time to think.

And then -

Then they will fight.


	13. Thirteen

Thirteen

These sewers are _unsettlingly_ familiar.

Because, Don realizes, he's already been in them several times tonight.

He's back to the place where they started. The place where Casey and April dropped them off, what feels like a lifetime ago.

When he looks up, the cover has already closed behind him. Through the narrow grating beside it, he's not entirely surprised to see a dark New York street.

He starts walking.

He goes cautiously, because he's certain that at any moment his surroundings will shift, and he'll be in a dungeon, or in the depths of outer space, or some other horrible scenario.

But nothing happens, and in fifteen minutes he's walking through the roar and the mist of the runoff junction.

And there, something makes him stop.

He listens.

_Yes._

Under the rush of the water is another sound, like someone quietly sobbing, pouring their own tears into the swirling basin below.

Don moves towards the sound. It's coming from _there_, from the other end of the platform, beyond where it curves out from the wall to accommodate a thick pipe running down from above.

Don comes around the pipe, and there, crouched on the far side of it, shaking and obviously crying, is Michelangelo.

"Mikey!" Don rushes forward, drawn magnetically to his brother. "Are you all right? I'm sorry, I don't know how -"

Mike's head whips up, and he stares at Don with eyes that have seen too much. "Stay _away_ from me!"

Don stops short from sheer surprise. "Mikey, what's wrong?" He approaches again, more slowly. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean for you to -"

Mike only presses himself back into the corner formed by the pipe and the wall. "Stay _away_."

Don backs up a pace, to a careful distance, but still in Mike's line of sight. There he crouches. "Mikey," he says, very gently. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to leave you."

"How..." Mikey draws a shuddering breath. "How do I know you're the real Donnie?"

Don's heart breaks. Mike must really have been up there, in that tunnel, and seen him... "Oh, Mikey," he breathes. "It's me. I'm all right."

Mike turns his head, glaring at him with one eye. "Prove it," he says. "Tell me something only Donnie would know."

Don sits back on his heels, thinking. Then he says, "You're walking down a road and you come to a fork. At the fork are two people. One of them always tells the truth and the other always tells lies."

"Don't do this to me," Mike moans.

"It's the riddle I told you on the way home," Don says, keeping the cadence of his voice soft and predictable. "Have you figured out the answer yet?"

"No!" Mike fumes. He's lifted his head now, is beginning to come out of his miserable hunch. "What the hell do I ask?"

"It's simple," Don says. "You ask, 'What's at the end of these roads?'"

"But I don't know which guy tells the truth!" Mike shouts at him. "And the guy who lies could tell me anything!"

Don shakes his head. "You don't ask them. You ask _yourself_. And then you walk the roads, and find the answer."

Mike stares at him. "That doesn't make any sense."

"And that's why you're a lousy scientist," Don replies. He smiles encouragingly. "Do you believe I'm Don?"

Mike blinks, seeming to almost have forgotten the original question. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah. Only the _real_ Don would say something that _stupid_."

Don rises from his crouch, and holds out his hand. Mike takes it, and lets Don help him up. Once they're at the same height again, Mike searches Don's face worriedly.

"Was that really you?" he asks. "At the cliff?"

Don nods. "I'm okay, though," he says, emphasizing the words. He looks his brother over. "How did you get up there? And how did you get back here?"

Mike only shakes his head. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

Don arches a brow. "Try me."

* * *

Until now, Leo had thought the phrase "blind with rage" was just a metaphor.

He's beginning to see the truth of it, though. His vision is filled with a red haze, obscuring everything beyond the tip of his own snout.

It hardly matters. The tunnel outside the door was, and still is, long and straight and featureless.

And every inch of it only makes him angrier.

_Is this what it's like to be Raph?_

He's trying to fight the anger. He can't think when he's this mad, and thinking, strategy, is his only real asset. It's the only thing he's _good_ at. It's the only way he can win this ridiculous game.

"But I _can't_ win!" he roars. "How can I _win_ when I can't _do_ anything?"

He parts the haze by a violent effort of will. The tunnel hasn't changed, and he has no options. His only move is to keep walking forward, for as long as Ue feels like making him do it.

And the red rushes back.

* * *

In the water-mirror, a tiny Turtle seems to walk against a motionless background.

"Stop walking, Leonardo," Ue hisses. "Stop _walking!_"

But Leonardo does not stop.

Ue dashes the mirror to the ground. This is useless. If Leonardo's thoughts had turned from his family to the prospect of battle, then he would have stilled himself, preparing his spirit for the rigors of combat.

But he has not stopped, and he shows no sign that he ever will.

What kind of warrior _is_ this Turtle? Does he have so little sense of honor, or so little respect for his challenger, that he does not even care that he has been called to battle?

He has offered to fight, true, but the offers were perfunctory, shallow. It was clear that his mind was elsewhere.

But time is running out, and Ue does not want to endure the required waiting period before renewing the challenge for a third time. Leonardo must be made to focus; he must be induced to face combat with a singleness of purpose and an unwavering resolve to see the battle through.

Ue turns, and is gone.

* * *

The haze lifts, just a little, but what Leonardo sees only infuriates him more.

His katana are instantly in his hands.

"Leonardo," Ue greets him, but Leo isn't interested in anything he has to say.

"Where are my brothers?" he spits. "What have you _done_ to them?"

"Calm yourself, Leonardo," Ue says. "Do not concern yourself with them."

Leo can't even form a coherent reply. "Don't - _what_ -"

"Focus, Leonardo!" Ue shouts at him. "You are distracted!"

"I am _not_ distracted!" Leo shouts back, but his wild swing with his katana proves that wherever his focus is, it isn't on the man in front of him.

"I have been waiting for you, Leonardo," Ue says, from beyond the reach of his swords. "I am becoming impatient."

"_You're_ waiting?" Leo is so tense he's shaking. "_You're_ the one who can show up wherever you want. _You're_ the one who wants to fight. If you wait, I won't come. I won't even _look_."

"You do not have to," Ue replies. "I am right in front of you."

Leo lunges, driving his swords right through where Ue must be standing. But he is not there, and the blades slice only through empty space.

"Where are you?" Leo growls. The cloud blurring his vision is becoming thicker, but he forces his other senses to open.

_There._

He whirls and strikes again. Then again, and again, slashing to either side as the other ninja teleports back and forth, avoiding him effortlessly.

"Why these games, Ue?" Leo rages. "Why won't you _fight_ me? Do you think you'll _lose?_"

"I will _not_ lose!" Ue's voice emanates from somewhere in the fiery haze. "But you... _You_ will not _fight!_"

"What are you _talking_ about?" Leo strikes again at where he thinks the voice is coming from, and again he misses. "I was ready to fight you the first time you showed yourself! I'm fighting you right now!"

"But you are _not_ fighting!" Ue roars at him. The haze parts suddenly, and Leo sees his enemy standing before him. "Do you not understand? Combat is not waving a sword at your enemy. The battle is in here!" Ue presses an ungloved finger to his forehead. "It is every moment of your life! It is _thinking_, it is _living_, as a warrior. Until you understand that, you are no warrior at all." He snatches up a corner of his cape. "And you are not worth my time." He sweeps the cape across his body, and disappears.

And Leo is left alone, panting, his katana glinting in the dim light, trapped in a game he doesn't even know how to play.

* * *

An instant later, Ue rematerializes in his war room.

Immediately, he begins pacing, his footsteps echoing in the stone chamber.

Leonardo is like no warrior he has met before. He has a strange, backwards spirit, uneager for the battle. Instead of turning outwards when he found himself alone, instead of looking to the path in front of him and his own immediate future, his thoughts stayed with his allies and the dangers _they_ were facing.

And he seems completely unaware that there is anything unusual about this. Instead of realizing that he is distracted from the true priority, he sees the challenge itself as a mere obstacle in his path back to his brothers.

Ue paces.

All of his efforts have been wrong. Leonardo will not stop thinking of his family if they are out of his sight, he will not stop thinking of them if they are dead. He will never stop thinking of them at _all_.

Ue strikes his fist into his palm.

_Then how to get him to fight?_

He tries to think backwards, to see things from Leonardo's point of view.

Leonardo only thought of his brothers more as he became less certain of their safety. Maybe the only way to get him to think about something else, was to let him know that his family was all right.

_He will not rest until he is sure._

Very well, then. He will give Leonardo one more chance to see his brothers, to make his peace with them. If the Turtle is not a fool, he will have learned from the last encounter not to ask for their assistance with what he must do alone. He will only reassure himself of their safety, settle his mind, and turn at last to the final confrontation.

Ue dips his staff, and a way opens.

* * *

"- and then I just ran, I wasn't even looking where I was going, and then all of a sudden I was back here."

They're sitting on the floor again, and Don's jaw has gradually migrated into his lap. He picks it up now, and slots it back into place so he can speak.

"That," he says, "would explain why you didn't believe I was me."

"Yeah." Mike rubs the back of his head. "Sorry about that."

"I don't blame you," Don says. He leans back. "So, if I may summarize... Every attempt to find the Lair only lands us in weirder places, there are fake versions of us running around, and, just to make things interesting, that Ultimate Ninja guy has dropped in and is after Leo again."

Mike nods emphatically.

"And now, when he teleports, he can take other people with him?"

Mike nods again.

Don puts his hand to his forehead. "Oh, shell."

"Yeah," Mike agrees. "And don't forget the part where he can, like, freeze you." He holds his arms up stiffly, indicating paralysis.

Don slides his hand down his face. "Leo's in a lot of trouble, isn't he?"

"Dude," Mike says, "I think we're _all_ in a lot of trouble." He brings his arms close to his chest, and enumerates the kinds of trouble on his fingers. "The real Raph is still MIA; there's probably a bunch of hideous monsters crawling around – even besides Raph, I mean; we don't know how many other unfair tricks this Ultimate Ninja guy can do…"

He trails off, and they sit in the cool, humid chamber, the waterfalls roaring around them, the weight of their problems sitting heavy on their shoulders. Don runs a hand slowly over his head, and wonders whether _any_ of them will see their home again.

"Mikey…" he says. "Do you think the Ultimate Ninja guy could have done _all_ of this?"

Mike looks around. "What, the…?"

Don nods. "Everything. The walls, the caves, that monster… how much power might he _have?_"

Mike bites his thumb. "Donnie… What do you know about staffs?"

Don frowns. "Mikey?"

"Like -" Mike outlines something in the air. "A staff with a bar on the end? Have you ever seen anything like that?"

Don shakes his head. "No, I don't know it. Why?"

"The Ultimate Ninja has one now." Mike glances to the side, as though afraid the ninja in question will suddenly appear and attack them. "Leo thinks it's important."

"I don't know anything about it," Don says again. He stands up. "But I think we had better go find Leo."

Mike looks up at him despairingly. "How? Where do we even start?"

Don looks out over the waterfalls. "We walk the roads."


	14. Fourteen

Fourteen

_What does he mean, I'm not fighting?_

Leonardo stalks down the endless passage.

_How am I SUPPOSED to fight him, if he disappears every time I try?_

He doesn't even know if the red haze is still there. His focus is completely inwards, as he tries to figure out how he can escape from this ridiculous game. He just walks, unseeing, one foot in front of the other.

What does Ue want him to _do?_ Fight? He's offered to fight every time the other ninja appeared, but the foreign warrior wouldn't engage him. He would only talk, taunt, torment, and then disappear.

_If he thinks I'm going to LOOK for him, he's crazy._

He will not go one inch out of his way to find his challenger. The only thing he seeks is his brothers, and his home. If Ue stands in his way, he will fight him. But if Ue lurks in some corner, expecting Leo to come to him... then he will be sorely disappointed.

_The battle is in here..._

Obviously, this challenge is more than just a physical contest. Ue has been playing mind games with him all night. Leo is proud of how he's handled them. He hasn't let the maze break him, hasn't stopped trying to make his way through it. He didn't fall when his brothers were taken from him; rather, the separation only made him stronger, drove him to move faster and destroy anything that stood in his way.

_And what does he mean I'm distracted? I'm NOT distracted. I'm focusing on what matters. _

_... Aren't I?_

Leo frowns as he walks.

Maybe he's looking at this wrong. He's been thinking of it as two separate problems: how to find his brothers, and what to do about the battle-crazed ninja who's determined to duel with him. He's been concentrating on the first, and considering the second mainly as an annoyance, as just another obstacle slowing him down and preventing him from reaching his goal.

But that isn't right. Ue isn't _incidental_ to the situation, he's _central_. Everything that's happened tonight has been his doing.

_So, maybe, the only way to get my brothers back is to fight Ue._

Which still leaves the question of how he can possibly engage the teleporting ninja in combat.

_But it's not about the combat. He doesn't want to fight me with weapons. He wants me to play this game._

"What are the rules?" he says. Not loudly. Just a question posed to himself.

Maybe they are whatever he wants them to be.

_"No, I will not trade you St. James for Oriental," Leo said. "Give me the dice." _

_"Come on," Mike wheedled, not passing the spotted cubes. "It's a good trade." _

_Friday evening. The Turtles had come back in from their game of tag, and they were sitting with their friends in a loose circle on the floor of the den, contemplating a very abstract representation of Atlantic City. _

_"But I don't have any other blue properties," Leo said. _

_"I'm sure Don and April will trade you theirs," Mike said confidently. _

_"What are you talkin' about?" Raph demanded. "Don and April don't have to trade Leo anything." _

_"That's how the game is played," Mike said, as though everyone knew this. _

_"Those ain't the rules," Raph objected. _

_"Sure they are," Mike said. "You have to match the colors. See?" He tugged on the tails of his own mask. "Orange." He reached forward to swat a loose end of Leo's bandana, where it had fallen over his shoulder when he leaned across the board to try again for the dice. "Blue." _

_"If those are the rules," April said, "what properties do I get?" _

_"You can have the yellow ones," Mike replied generously, smoothly palming the dice before Leo's stretching fingers could grab them. "Yellow is a good color for you." He turned back to Leo. "What do you say?" _

_"All right, fine," Leo said, passing over the square of orange-striped cardboard. _

_"Are you outta your mind?" Raph clutched his head while Mike cheerfully arranged his trio of orange properties. "Now he's gonna win!" _

_"So what?" Leo said, realigning his own properties to make room for Oriental. "It's only a game." _

_"Yeah, Raphie," Mike said, in his most irritatingly off-hand manner. "It's only a game." He produced a stack of five-hundred-dollar Monopoly bills, seemingly from nowhere, and handed them to Don. "Hotels on my orange properties, banker." _

_Casey groaned the loudest. His shoe token was five, seven, and eight spaces from Mike's new luxury development._

It hadn't been about winning, that night. It had just been about spending time with his friends and family, about enjoying their company and seeing them happy and free from their usual worries.

Leo had gone bankrupt two rounds after the trade, but as he sat on the beat-up couch watching his youngest brother joyfully develop his real estate empire, he had felt like a winner.

There was more than one way to play every game, and something else that Ue said begins to give Leo an idea. He works on it as he walks, and the next time he turns his thoughts outward, the red haze is completely gone.

Just ahead of him, the passage narrows suddenly, and disappears around a curve.

Leo turns the corner without hesitation, and keeps walking, his mind clear and his eyes wide open.

* * *

Raphael shivers, and draws his knees closer to his chest.

He'd been walking in the narrow passages. Then he'd been crawling, and then creeping on his stomach, as the ceiling got steadily lower. He was _not_ going to go back. Not until the tunnel became completely impassable. Sooner or later, it _had_ to open out again.

It hadn't.

He'd kept forcing his way forward, to the point where his shell just would not fit through the narrow opening. The tunnel had become nothing more than a round tube through the rock, and no matter how he turned and twisted, he could not go any further.

He had started to creep backwards, the rim of his shell scraping against the walls, but his feet had touched stone and he could not get through. He had reached out with his toes, exploring, but somehow the passage behind him had become blocked, and he was trapped.

He had fought, at first, beating at the solid rock with fists and elbows and knees, but the capsule-shaped space he was entombed in only became smaller, gathering him up, making him curl in on himself until he could barely move.

And then he had just stopped trying.

He shivers again. The space around him had morphed into a cube, just big enough for him to hunch in with his arms wrapped around his legs and his face tucked against his knees. The walls had become white, almost too bright to look at, and it was _cold_.

"Raphael."

His answer is only a rasping whisper, almost lost in the thick padding of his kneeguards. "Lea' me alone."

"Raph."

"No." His arms tighten around his legs, and his eyes squeeze even more firmly shut.

Again, that voice of infinite, infuriating patience. "Raph. Look at me."

"No!" _Just leave me ALONE!_

Whoever it is, they won't go away. "Raph. Stand up."

His voice shakes, uncharacteristically, and he doesn't even care. "I can't."

"Yes, you can." Gentle encouragement, filled with confidence because it doesn't know how to doubt. "Give me your hand."

He doesn't think he can. With a great effort, he lifts his head.

A green hand is floating in front of him, sticking downwards from the white ceiling.

"I can't," he says again.

"Raphael." The hand waits. It will wait forever. "Come with me."

Then his own hand rises, moved by a force that surely can't have come from within himself, and his fingers are touching the other hand, and he's being pulled up through the whiteness.

And he's standing with his brother.

Leo steadies him as he tilts dangerously, and Raph doesn't take his eyes from Leo's face until he's sure he's standing on his own two feet.

Then he looks down.

There's no white box.

Only a concrete shelf beside a wide drainage channel.

"What the _hell?_" he murmurs.

A gentle pressure on the back of his shoulder brings his attention back to his brother.

"Are you all right?" Leo asks.

"Yeah." Raph pulls back, letting Leo know he can stand on his own. "'m okay." He looks around, trying to figure out where he is and how he got there. "Is this... where we ate the ice cream?"

Leo blinks at him. "What?"

"You remember, that time with the construction workers...?"

Leo glances around the tunnel. "I don't know, maybe. Listen, Raph, we've got bigger problems. You remember that masked ninja who challenged me to a duel once?"

"Yeah...?" Raph says slowly.

"He's back," Leo says. "And he's trying to play some kind of game with me. All of this -" he makes a gesture that encompasses the entire night "- is his doing."

"This is _his_ funhouse?" Raph's hands go, almost of their own accord, to his weapons. "I'll freakin' kill him."

He'd like to say more in that vein, but Leo turns sharply, looking down the tunnel, his own hands going to his katana. Raph follows his gaze automatically, his sai sliding easily into his palms.

A minute later Leo relaxes, and only then does he seem to realize what Raph is doing. "Put those away," he hisses.

"What's goin' on?" Raph asks, even as he obeys. "I didn't hear anything."

"I know," Leo says tersely. "Just don't talk."

"Wha-"

"For the love of God, Raphael," Leo snaps, "_do not talk._"

Raph shuts his mouth.

Leo glances up and down the tunnel again, then turns in the direction that _should_ lead back to the place where they had first split up. "Follow me," he says.

And Raph does, unquestioningly.

As they walk, Leo briefly recounts his adventures. Raph has the feeling he's leaving a lot out.

"So every time Don or Mike took initiative," Leo summarizes, "every time they tried to help, every time they said they were able to do something... Ue took them from me." He looks over his shoulder. "Do you understand, Raph?"

Raph nods mutely. _Okay. I won't talk. But if you think I won't fight this bastard..._

Leo stops, and turns fully to face him. "Raph. I'm serious. If we see him, do _not_ draw your weapons. Don't do anything to provoke him. Do you understand me? You won't win; you'll only get hurt. And if I'm going to have to fight him, I need to know you'll be safe."

It only takes one gesture for Raph to express what he thinks of _that_ idea.

Leo glares back at him stonily. "I don't care if you flip me off. _Do not fight him._"

Raph crosses his arms defiantly.

"Raphael," Leo says, and there's incredible strain in his voice. "I know you want to fight for me. I _know._ But if you have any respect for me at all, you'll do what I'm telling you." A little of the tension leaks from his body, and he looks vulnerable, suddenly. "Your safety is more important than mine."

Raph holds Leo's gaze. They've never needed words to communicate. Their eyes are enough. _Not true, bro._

"Raph," Leo says, and it's barely more than a whisper. "Please. Don't worry about me. Take care of Don and Mike. Get them home."

Raph looks away, then back. If there's one thing that can stop him from helping a brother, it's knowing that the other two brothers are in equal danger. _Fine. But as soon as they're safe, your ugly friend's ass is MINE._

Leo nods. "Thank you." He closes his eyes heavily. "You can talk," he says. "But _please_, be careful what you say."

"It -" He struggles with the words, beating down the urge to let fly a string of creative threats. Leo watches him apprehensively. "I trust you, bro," he says finally. "Whatever you want me to do."

"Okay." Leo glances again over his shoulder. "We have to keep moving."

Raph follows his lead, and wonders whether he'll be strong enough to keep his promise.

* * *

"- and when I climbed down I was back where we started," Don concludes, with perfect timing.

They're not where they started, but they're where everything started to go wrong.

The place where Raph had left them.

"Okay," Don says. "Here's the fork. Now... what's at the end of these roads?"

Mike is frowning at something over Don's shoulder.

"What?" Don asks, and turns to look.

"Are you sure this is the right place?" Mike says. "Because, remember, we left a note, but it's not here..."

Don scans the tunnel. "I _think_ this is the right place..." He smiles suddenly. "Maybe Leo and Raph have been here. Maybe they found it."

"But Leo already knew," Mike reminds him. "Remember, he found me here after you..."

"Oh," Don says, his spirits falling again. "Well, maybe Raph..."

"Even if he did," Mike says dejectedly, "how does that help us now?"

"Well, maybe..." Don falters. It really _doesn't_ help them. They still have no way of knowing where Raph might have wound up. Even if the note had somehow helped him to get home, they still can't contact him to ask how he got there. "I don't know."

"So now what?" Mike looks up at Don hopelessly. "I can't do this anymore, Donnie. I _know_ where these roads lead. And I don't want to go there again."

Don sighs and looks to the ceiling. Sometimes ceilings help him think, but this one doesn't give him any ideas at all. "Mikey, I'm sorry. I don't know..." He cuts off abruptly, and lowers his gaze, staring straight ahead. "Someone is coming."

Mike whips around, and both of them back up, away from the side tunnel that Raphael disappeared down so many hours ago. Two shadows loom towards them, and they press their shells against the curving wall, preparing for anything.

The two forms that emerge are what they had most hoped for, and what they had most feared.

Leo and Raph pause at the mouth of the tunnel, then rush forward to meet them. "Mikey! Donnie! Are you -"

"Wait." Mike puts out his arm, throwing it sideways in front of Don, forming a barrier. Leo and Raph come to a halt, expressions of confusion on their faces. "Are you guys you?"

"What?" Leo says. "Mikey..."

"No." Mike keeps his arm where it is, and somehow it prevents everyone from moving. "You have to prove who you are." He glances to Donnie. "We'll prove who we are also, so you know it's not a trick." He brings his arm back in, poking his thumb against his chest. "I'm Michelangelo. I can make a sandwich with my feet." The arm goes out again, making a sideways gesture at Don. "Now you. Tell them something only you would know."

Don frowns. "Uh... My online identity is reclusive academic Donald Teller."

"Okay, we believe you," Leo says, though it's obvious he never doubted them in the first place. "Listen, the -"

"No," Mike says again. "Now you guys tell us something."

Leo sighs. "Fine. When we were three years old you guys called me Nardie because you thought we should all have nicknames ending in -ee."

Mike laughs, part nervous tension, part genuine amusement. "Okay, you're Leo." His expression becomes stern again as he turns to Raph. "What about _you?_"

"This is stupid," Raph mutters.

"Raph," Leo says, and the word seems to contain whole conversations.

Raph's mouth twitches, and then he looks to Don. "You remember that time you replaced Mike's video games with fakes?"

Don nods. "Sure."

"And after that, he renamed all your computer files, and ya couldn't find anything?"

Even as he says it, Don remembers. "_Yes._"

Raph jerks a thumb against his chest. "That was really my idea."

Beside him, Mike giggles, so Don knows it's true. "Good. I still owe you back for that one."

Raph crosses his arms and grins smugly. "Bring it on, bro."

"Okay, okay," Mike says. "We're all us." He opens his arms. "C'mere."

Leo and Raph aren't usually big on group hugs, but they move forward without hesitation, embracing their brothers, completing the circle.

They stay that way for a long moment, and then they separate. Partially, at least. Mike stays hanging between Raph and Leo, an arm draped over each of them. "Where've you guys _been?_" he asks.

"Never mind that," Leo says. He looks to Don. "Donnie, are you in the loop on this? The ninja who -"

"I know," Don says.

Leo nods shortly. "Good." He glances at each of them, making sure they're all paying attention. "Guys, listen. Whatever you do, don't say anything threatening towards him. Don't try to fight him. Don't -" He breaks off at Mike's stricken expression.

"I am so, so sorry," Mikey says. "I -"

Leo squeezes Mike's hand, where it lays on his shoulder. "It's not your fault, Mikey. Just, guys, please - whatever happens, stay together. Do exactly what I tell you. Don't give him any reason to hurt you." He searches their faces again. "Promise me."

Mike nods earnestly. Raph's face is stormy, but he grunts assent.

"What's the plan?" Don asks softly.

"We're going to stick together," Leo says, and his tone allows no disagreement. He turns to Raph. "No more running off."

"Whaddya lookin' at me for?" Raph demands.

"I still need your direction sense," Leo says. "But you have to take us with you."

"Guys?" Mikey says in a small voice.

"_Where?_" Raph pushes Mike off and stands facing Leo. "I tried every freakin' tunnel; there's no way out."

"There must be another," Leo says. "Try to think."

"Guys?" Mikey says again.

Raph shakes his head vehemently. "There's _nothin'_, Leo. Where the hell do you wanna go, anyway? You think you can outrun a freakin' _teleporter?_"

"_Guys,_" Mike says, for a third time.

"_What_, Mikey?" Leo says impatiently.

"I hate to tell you this," Mike says, "but... the water is running."


	15. Fifteen

Fifteen

They all look down.

The water is swishing steadily past their ankles, dodging to either side of their legs as it hurries on its way.

Wordlessly, Don gives Leo the flashlight.

Leo flicks it on. The beam travels up, across the dancing ripples of the water, and comes to rest on the far end of the tunnel.

Or, at least, the farthest point that it can illuminate.

"Um," Don says. "Someone please tell me there _was_ a wall there earlier."

"Oh, there was," Raph growls.

"Come on," Leo says.

They move forward as a unit, the light going before them, peering ever deeper into the gloom of the passage.

In a minute they have crossed the threshold where the wall had been.

And then, they don't need the flashlight anymore.

Leo looks up in wonder. The tunnel has opened out into a cavern, not as big as the one with the columns, but still bigger than it should be. The roof of it is high and domed and emanating a powerful white light.

His gaze moves downwards, skimming across the smoothly rounded walls, scanning the room for anything that isn't empty and blank and _white_.

"Um," Mike says, from behind him. "Once again, hate to tell you guys this, but..."

Leo spins.

And reels, his balance thrown off by the sudden lack of a visual anchor.

The dark doorway is gone.

He and his brothers are the only things left that have color, that have solidity and dimensionality.

Leo turns off the flashlight, but he doesn't give it back. Something about the weight of it in his hand is comforting.

"Stay on your guard," he says. "Be ready for anything."

He moves slowly towards the center of the chamber, and his brothers follow him closely. There's no point in staying near the wall, now that the door is gone. Being in the center gives them more room to move, a better position for watching each other's backs.

"Don't like this, Leo," Raph says, from behind him.

Leo doesn't reply. He doesn't like it either. They're completely at Ue's mercy, as they have been all night, and once again he has to trust that the alien ninja's honor, as strange as it is, still forbids killing people without giving them a fair chance to fight back.

"Wait," is all he says.

And it's all they can do. There's nowhere left to run, not even a pretense of being able to avoid Ue's challenge. They can only -

No.

There's still one move left.

He puts the flashlight into his belt, takes two steps away from his brothers, and draws his swords.

"Ue!" he shouts. "Fight me!"

His voice rings from the rounded walls, echoing back and forth, returning manifold to his own ears.

_Fight me!_

And then the echoes seem to come together, to gather and solidify. The air before him shimmers, and Ue is standing there, his staff in his hand.

"I would be honored," he says.

Leo raises his swords, and then, even as his mind screams for his brothers to stay still, he feels them come up behind him, flanking him on either side.

But at least they haven't drawn their weapons.

"We demand right of observance," Donatello says, and Leo has no idea what he's talking about.

Ue makes a noise of irritation in his throat. "Very well," he grates. "Stand aside."

Leo feels a pat on his shoulder - he's not even sure from whom - and then his brothers withdraw. He doesn't know what they've just done, except that apparently they've secured the right to stay in the arena while he fights. The knowledge is both a relief and a source of fear.

_If they try to get involved... if he hurts them..._

Ue draws his sword, and bows over it, and Leo lets every thought but survival slide into the back of his mind.

A second later Ue is leaping at him, slashing downwards. Leo blocks, and the battle is on.

He blocks again, as Ue presses him with a flurry of strikes. A high block, then a sweep to slide Ue's blade off to the side, and his second katana comes across automatically for a following attack.

_No. Stick to your strategy._

He halts the progress of the blade, turning it instead to push with the flat, to create space between himself and his opponent.

Ue moves back, bringing his sword up defensively, expecting Leo to follow his positioning move with a strike. But Leo doesn't, and Ue doesn't wait for him to change his mind.

They engage again. Ue drives with the tip of his sword, and Leo leaps backwards, avoiding the lunge. Ue is taller than him, has a much longer reach, and after Leo dodges the other ninja is on him again faster than he anticipated. He crosses his swords to block Ue's follow-up, and forces the attack away with all of his strength.

_Stronger than me, too... How can he have that much power in one arm?_

Leo dodges to the side. Sweeping his katana outward to throw off the previous attack left him open to another, and Ue didn't miss the opportunity. Leo turns, parrying as Ue pursues him.

"You are not fighting, Leonardo," Ue says, over their locked blades.

"Of course I am," Leo returns. He strikes at Ue's weapon with his free sword, knocking it away. Again, he doesn't follow the move with anything.

"You are not attacking!" Ue drives at him again, and Leo turns, evading the strike without using his weapons.

"I don't want to," Leo says. He brings his swords up, holding them vertically, creating a cage to block Ue's swinging strike. "I don't want to kill you, Ue." He moves his katana again, smoothly, blocking another attack. "Don't make me."

Ue's moves are becoming mechanical, uninspired. He's more focused on the conversation than the battle. "Fight me, Leonardo!"

"I am," Leo repeats. He blocks, again, again, right, left, nothing more than a white noise background to their words. "This is how I fight. Am I good enough for you, Ue? Am I worth your time?"

Ue narrows his eyes, and launches suddenly into a renewed series of attacks. Leo's attention returns instantly to the physical battle.

_Defend. Survive. But don't kill him if you don't have to._

Leo parries each thrust of Ue's sword, giving ground as Ue advances, never counterattacking. Ue is fighting now with all his skill and energy, but something about it is still repetitive, predictable.

One-sided.

_He had two swords, last time. And a gauntlet. Now he only has one sword, and this staff. But... he's not USING the staff._

Leo throws off Ue's lunge, and counterstrikes experimentally, targeting the staff.

Ue's reaction is explosive. He leaps backward, thrusting the staff behind him, guarding with his sword across his body.

Leo waits.

Ue remains on guard longer than before, expecting now that Leonardo will press the advantage. Then, when Leo does nothing, he closes again, leading with his sword arm, not bringing the staff to bear.

_Strange. But it doesn't change anything._

Leo deflects Ue's strike, and retreats in a curve. He's fighting defensively, not stupidly. He won't get himself backed against the wall.

Ue follows, his sword flashing forward almost with every step. On some steps, though, he doesn't attack. He seems to hold off on purpose, trying to entice Leonardo into seizing an opening.

"Fight me!" Ue shouts again, when he has chased Leonardo in this way around half the circumference of the room.

"No," Leo says.

"_Fight me!_" Ue roars, and then Leo is blasted off his feet by an unseen attack, and he skids on his shell across the smooth floor.

Ue is on him before he can get up, and Leo is forced to roll, taking a glancing blow across his back before he can get out of range. He pushes himself to his feet, and as Ue engages him again, he has the distinct feeling that the other ninja purposely slowed up, letting him stand before renewing the attack.

_He's giving me every chance to fight. _

_But I won't do it._

"Aren't you going to kill me, Ue?" Leo grits, as he forces Ue's sword away yet again.

"No," Ue says, pushing back against Leo's blade. "You do not yet deserve it. You do not deserve to die, if you will not fight for life." He increases his effort, shoving Leo back, giving himself room to maneuver. "I will teach you to fight!"

Leo braces for attack, but it doesn't come. Instead, his swords rise of their own accord. His arms lift to either side, straining outward, as though invisible ropes were tied around his wrists, pulling on him from either direction.

He pulls back against it. But then his whole body is lifting, his legs likewise being stretched to their limits, and it feels like he'll be torn to pieces. The pain is everywhere, ripping him apart. He squeezes his eyes closed, trying to hold himself together, trying not to pass out from the burning in every fiber of his body.

Dimly, he hears Ue gloating. "All creatures choose life over death. Suffering is the approach of death, and the spirit will always fight against it. So suffer, Leonardo! And _fight!_"

He can't fight. He can't even _think_.

But he wants to live.

* * *

It's taking all of Raphael's self-control to keep his hands off his sai.

He can't decide whether Donnie's request was brilliant or idiotic. He'd been all set to have it out with this Ue guy as soon as he appeared, but Donnie had looked at him meaningfully.

_Leo has a plan. Do what he says._

Seriously, though, he is _not_ seeing how this plan is going to work. Frankly, he can't see a _plan_ at all.

Leo is just letting the other ninja chase him around the arena. He hasn't counterattacked once, even though he's had plenty of opportunity. After a certain point, it even looked like Ue was leaving himself open on purpose, trying to goad Leo into making a move. But Leo, out of honor or generosity or whatever stupid thing was in his head, wasn't taking advantage.

_What the hell are you doing?_ Raph wants to scream. _You can't win that way!_

And this part where Leo is floating in the air, being tortured by invisible forces, is pretty much the last straw.

"The staff," Don says suddenly, from beside him.

Raph half-turns. He's listening to Don, but his eyes are still on Leo. "What?"

"The staff," Don repeats. "His power comes from the staff. Do you see how he's guarding it? And how he lifted it, just when -"

"Yeah," Raph growls. "I got it."

"Raph, don't -"

But before Donnie can finish that sentence either, Raph has drawn a sai and thrown it, in a single movement almost too fast to follow.

The weapon flies true. It catches the staff between two prongs, knocking it out of Ue's hand, so that it goes clattering away across the floor, the sai ringing beside it.

Leo crashes to the floor. In the same moment, Mike springs forward, launching himself towards the staff. Ue is moving too, but Raph throws his other sai, and the second that Ue spends in dodging it is enough for Michelangelo to get to his goal.

Mike snatches up staff and sai, but then Ue is on him, grabbing the staff with one hand and wielding his sword with the other, and Mike's hands are full of unfamiliar weapons and he has to block Ue's furious sword strikes with the sai.

Raph charges in from the side and tackles Ue bodily. The force of it rips the staff from both his hand and Mike's, and it goes spinning away again.

"Get there!" Raph screams, as he pins the thrashing ninja to the floor. "_Get there!_"

Mike dives again for the staff, but even as he does he realizes that they've just gotten themselves into a game of Keep Away in an enclosed space with an opponent who can _teleport_, and as soon as Ue gets the staff back, they're all toast.

He grabs onto the staff for all he's worth, and then, sure enough, Ue is in front of him.

He doesn't have his sword now, though. Raph must have wrestled it away from him.

Mike strikes out with the staff, reflexively, and Ue dodges.

Not only does he dodge, he moves back out of range.

For a moment, both of them stand there, eying each other.

Then, with a shout, Mike leaps forward, dropping the sai so he can get both hands on the staff and bring it down with all his strength.

Ue tries again to dodge, but Mike compensates, adjusting his swing and aiming the staff to bring the end of the crossbar down on his target.

He connects.

And Ue freezes, tensing as though electricity is pouring through him.

Mike stands there dumbfounded, watching Ue tremble from the force of whatever the staff is doing to him. Then there's an explosive blue flash, and Mike is thrown backwards, and it's all he can do to hold onto the staff.

He scrambles back to his feet, and charges forward, intending to do that again. Whatever just happened, it hurt Ue a lot more than it hurt him, and the foreign ninja is still recovering.

Before Mike can get there, though, Ue sees him coming, turns, and vanishes.

Mike looks around warily, knowing the other ninja could rematerialize anywhere. A second later Ue does appear, near where Leo is still lying.

"Look out!" Mike shouts.

Raph had already fallen back to where Don is crouching over Leo, and he uses Ue's own sword to drive him off. The threat is enough to get Leo back on his feet, and he rejoins the battle.

Instead of attacking, though, he only intervenes, preventing Raph from pressing the advantage against their unarmed opponent.

"Are you outta your mind?" Raph shouts at him. "Kill 'im, Leo!"

"Stay out of this, Raph!" Leo shouts back, and Raph feels the fear rolling off him in waves, even as their enemy stands at bay before them.

Not only at bay, but seeming to wait for them, remaining where he is even though he could be elsewhere with a thought, still acting as though he _wants_ Leo to have every chance to strike.

"Not backing off from this, bro," Raph says. He's afraid too, watching this battle where he can't understand the strategy of either warrior, and he's not going to feel bad for disobeying Leo's commands when Leo's "plan" was so obviously going to end in disaster. _Come on, Leo. Finish him._

But Leo is just standing there, not attacking Ue, not letting Raph attack him either.

Well, there was still _one_ Turtle who might have means and opportunity, and the guts to use them.

"Mikey!" Raph calls. "Use the damn thing!"

"I'm trying!" Mike is clutching the staff, shaking it, his face screwed up with intense concentration.

"Donnie -" Raph says, but then somebody gasps and he's looking around, trying to figure out where Ue went.

"Let go!"

Raph turns. While Leo was losing the opportunity to deliver a killing strike, Ue got tired of waiting for him, teleported back to Michelangelo, and made a grab for the staff.

"Electrocute him!" Raph screams.

"_How?!_"

"The blink," Don says suddenly.

"_What?_" Again, Raph doesn't take his eyes off the action. "Donnie, if you don't stop sayin' -"

"_The blink,_" Don repeats insistently. "We have to use the blink!"

And then Donnie is charging off, and Raph is left with the only brother who's actually been challenged, the only one who won't fight.

"I told you to stay out of this," Leo grits.

"As if, Fearless," Raph returns, and then he's following Donnie, determined to find out what the brainiac wants him to do, and then do it.

Don shouts as he bears down on Ue, making his presence obvious. He doesn't even bother to follow through with his strike, stopping short just before the place where the ninja had been standing.

"Nice one," Mike says, and then Ue rematerializes behind him, delivering a powerful kick to his shell.

Mike flies forward, losing his grip on the staff as he falls. Instantly, Ue vanishes.

"What the hell is the blink?" Raph demands.

But Don ignores him. He hefts his bo, holds it above his shoulder for one second, then launches it.

At nothing.

But at the same moment that the bo reaches the place where the staff has come to rest, Ue reappears, directly in its path. It's only at that moment that he becomes aware the weapon has been thrown, and by then it's mere feet from him and he has just a fraction of a second to try to dodge before the bo hits him in the chest, knocking him back.

And while he's recovering, Leo grabs the staff mid-somersault and rolls away with it.

"The blink!" Don says triumphantly. And then he's gone again, moving to cover Leo, snatching up a sai along the way.

Mike is on his feet again, grabbing up the other sai, tossing it to Raph and drawing his own weapons. "Good thing Donnie's on our side, huh?"

Raph grins.

And then both of them are barreling forward, diving into the fray.

Leo had to sheath both of his swords in order to get the staff, and he didn't have time to draw one again before Ue was on him, attacking with Don's bo.

The two weapons crack against one another. Ue is fighting now with even greater energy than before, almost manic in his attempts to recover the staff.

"Give it _back!_" he shouts, the bo in his hands whirling with incredible speed. "You don't know how to use it!"

"Donnie -" Leo blocks an overhead strike "- tells me -" he jumps over a sweep "- it's magic."

Ue looks like he's about to reply, but then he vanishes, and Leo has to jump back to avoid a sai that was meant to plunge into Ue's back.

Don stumbles, checking his strike. "Shell, Leo," he says. "You had better hurry up and learn how to use that thing."

"Cover me," Leo says.

Don turns towards their arriving brothers, trading the sai in his hand for Ue's sword, and then he and Raph and Mike guard Leo as best they can, as Leo tries desperately to force magic from the staff.

"Come on," Leo whispers. "Come _on_."

The staff shivers faintly in his hands, as if it's trying to come to life. In front of him, Raph drives off Ue's attempt to break the circle.

_Vanish him,_ Leo thinks, to the staff. _Send him back to his home world._

The staff feels warm. The heat of it crawls up his arms, and into his chest, and it's _working_...

And then Mike cries out behind him, and his concentration is broken.

He turns automatically.

"No!" Don shouts, as he dives across to back up Mike. "_Focus_, Leo!"

He tries again, aiming his mental energy at the point where the crossbar joins the haft, willing his spirit to fuse with the magic of the staff and manifest his desire.

_Send him home, send him home, send him home..._

The words circle in his head, and the world disappears in a blue haze.

He can't see, or hear, so he doesn't know that Ue has gotten his brothers turned around and tangled up, trying to follow his rapid-fire teleports. He doesn't know that Ue has gotten inside their line of defense.

And he doesn't know that Ue has wrapped his hand around the staff, and added his own will to the energy pouring through it.

Until everything goes black.


	16. Sixteen

Sixteen

Leo stands in the middle of the cavern, his katana in his hands. Before him, Ue stands with sword and staff. Two faint bubbles of silver light are fading into the points of the crosspiece.

_What... ?_

It's as if the battle he remembers never happened.

He sinks lower in his fighting stance.

"Leo!"

"_Leo!_"

_His brothers._

He looks over his shoulder. His brothers are standing in a blue bubble, like he remembers from the first time he dueled with Ue. They're beating against it with their fists, and calling for him.

He hears them, and he wants to go to them.

But he can't.

It's over, now. He can't win this fight. Now he knows for sure Ue is willing to use magic in battle, and he can't win against that. His only hope is strategy.

And his strategy had failed.

It had been working. It had been _working_, until his brothers interfered. If they had only waited, if he had endured the pain a little longer...

Why couldn't they have just done as he told them?

_Maybe I should have told them what I was planning to do..._

Ue interrupts his thoughts. "Your brothers have great spirit, Leonardo," he says. "But I am afraid they do not understand what _right of observance_ means."

"Let them go," Leo says softly. "Just let them go."

"The rules state," Ue says, and Leo has the feeling he's quoting from a sourcebook that has not been made equally available to everyone, "that if an attendant abuses the right of observance, that privilege can be revoked."

Leo feels cold inside, at what Ue might understand _revoking a privilege_ to mean.

"I could send them elsewhere," Ue says, and Leo's hands tighten just a little more on the hilts of his katana. "But I know how you will react. So, instead, _I_ will go elsewhere. I will let you take your leave of them. And then we will battle." He sheathes his sword. "You know that there will be no more cowardly tricks. Next time, we _will_ duel."

He raises his staff, and then he vanishes.

"Leo!"

He turns, and his brothers come spilling out of the vanished bubble, moving as quickly as they can to his side.

"Are you all right?" Don asks. "I think you passed out..."

"I'm okay," Leo says. He lifts his swords, angling them over his shoulders and returning them to their sheaths.

"What the hell were you doing?" Raph demands. "Why wouldn't you fight him?"

"I can't," Leo says, sinking towards the floor. "I can't kill him, Raph."

"Don't think you get much choice, bro," Raph says, as all four of them sit heavily on the smooth stone. "It's him or you, and, uh, I know which one _I_ pick."

Leo rests his head in his hands. "He won't leave me alone. He's waiting for me, forcing me into this. I'm giving him every chance to walk away, but..."

"He won't back down," Don surmises, "and you _can't_."

"Exactly," Leo says.

"But you knew that," Mike says, putting a hand on Leo's shoulder. "You knew he wouldn't quit. Why did you keep giving him chances?"

Leo only buries his face deeper in his hands, and can't reply.

"Everyone deserves a second chance," Don says, into the silence.

"Okay," Raph says, "but ya gotta draw the line somewhere."

"It doesn't matter now," Leo says hollowly. "I'm over the line. I couldn't beat him even if I wanted to."

"What were you _trying_ to do?" Mike asks. "I mean, it didn't look too good from where we were standing, but you must've had a better plan than hoping he would get bored or whatever..."

"No, that was pretty much it," Leo says. "It - it's not that he wants to _kill_ me. He wants to _fight_ me. But only if I fight back, only if I'm – "worth it", whatever that means. Like... like a cat playing with a mouse. If the mouse lies very still, the cat loses interest."

"So that's it," Raph says bluntly. "You were hoping he would lose interest."

Leo nods.

"Fuck, Leo," Raph says. "That is the stupidest damn plan you ever came up with."

"It was all I had," Leo says.

"And that was better than letting us help because... ?"

"Because you _can't!_" Leo jerks his head up, glaring at his younger brother. "Did you fail to notice that he can stop you with a _thought?_ Did you miss the fact that, even without magic, he's at least as good of a ninja as you are? Damn it, Raph, he's after _me!_ And if you could stop being a selfish, pig-headed idiot for two seconds, you would see that _you_ at least could get out of this alive, and that's the best we can do tonight! And if you insist on throwing that away also, then nothing I have ever done for you matters at all."

There's a stunned silence.

"Please," Leo says, more quietly. "This is the best I can do. Don't let it be a waste."

"Leo..." Don says. "Don't give up yet."

Leo shakes his head. "I'll fight him," he says. "I'll do _something_. But wherever I go after this... I don't think I'll be coming back."

"It was a good idea you had," Mike says. "I mean, when you explain it like that... it almost makes sense."

"I thought so too," Leo says. "It was almost working. But I didn't expect him to... to do those things. I underestimated his determination."

"No," Raph says suddenly. "_He_ underestimated _yours_." He looks at Leo steadily. "You weren't gonna break, were you? You were gonna go all the way."

"I would've tried," Leo says.

"Damn," Raph says. "I fucked up, didn't I."

"Yeah," Leo says. "You kinda did." He stands up and rolls his shoulders. The pain from earlier has faded, and there's no point in delaying the inevitable anymore.

His brothers rise as well, standing with him one last time.

"Now what?" Mike says.

"Now I fight," Leo says. "I'm ready." Then, louder, more confidently: "I'm ready."

At his words, lines of color explode across the walls, and Leo squints to protect his eyes. When he looks again, every inch of wall space is covered by tiny symbols, each a subtly different rainbow hue.

"What is _that?_" Mike says from beside him.

"I've seen this," Raph says, taking a step forward. "Down in one of the tunnels. I think - I think it's _writing_..."

"What does it say?" Don asks.

"How should I know?"

No sooner has Raph spoken, than the strange symbols begin to rotate, seeming to turn in a third dimension, as though millions of tiny panels are flipping over. When they settle, the walls are inscribed with a different set of symbols, a set slightly more familiar.

Leo moves forward, seeing if these characters are what he thinks they are. "It's kanji..."

"Can ya read it?" Raph asks. Though Splinter had taught the Japanese syllabary writing to all of them, they got little practice at it in their American lives, and only Leo could get through more than a very simple paragraph.

Leo scans the wall in bafflement. "I don't even know where to start..."

Once again, the cavern seems to hear their words, and the panels begin to flip again. This time, there is not a symbol for every panel. Three-quarters of the rounded dome becomes blank, and the remaining area changes to show a single message in big, bold characters.

"Okay..." Leo studies the symbols. The first are katakana, an approximate rendering of his foreign name. "It says... _Leonardo. The sun is rising. You must fight. Enter the..._" He frowns at the unfamiliar word. "Portal? _Alone._"

"Portal?" Raph says. "Ya sure that's right?"

"No..." Leo admits. He turns to his brothers. "Never mind that." He looks to each of them in turn, willing them to listen carefully. "Guys, I'm running out of time. Whatever -" He squeezes his eyes shut. It's too painful.

_You are ninja, Leonardo. This is what you were trained to do._

He takes a deep breath, opens his eyes, and continues. "Whatever happens... do what needs to be done." He puts his hand on Michelangelo's shoulder, the brother who most needs his strength tonight. "Be strong. Get home safely."

A loud sniffle from Mike, and he pulls his youngest brother into a hug. "I love you."

"I love you too, bro," Mikey says in his ear.

After a long minute, Mike backs away, and Don advances to embrace his brother.

"You can do it, Leo," he says. "I know you'll come back to us."

"One way or another," Leo says grimly.

Don pulls away just enough to meet his gaze. "_With honor, Leo_," he says, in the language of their adoptive ancestors.

"_Always._"

Don steps back, and Raph is next, hugging Leo fiercely.

"Go all the way, bro," he growls. "Kick his ass. Then bring it home for me, so I can kick it again."

"Take care of them, Raph," is all Leo says in reply.

They separate.

"I love you all," Leo says, one more time. "Tell Master Splinter -"

"We won't," Don says. Then, more softly: "_You_ will."

Leo nods, with all the confidence he can muster. Then he turns to face the wall.

_Enter the portal. WHAT portal?_

This time, the cavern seems to sense his very thoughts. The symbols on the wall begin to flow like water, rippling, whirling clockwise, slowly and then faster. They form into a shining circle, then spread downward, becoming an archway.

Leo holds his head high, and walks through it.

* * *

"Leonardo," Ue greets him cordially, almost before his vision clears. "Welcome."

"Ue," Leo returns, with equal, if cold, courtesy. His eyes remain fixed on Ue, but his attention flicks around the room. It's another chamber, rounded like the last one, but smaller, limiting the possibilities for evasive maneuvering. Ue meant what he said, in the other cavern. There would be no more tricks.

"The time for our challenge ends soon," Ue says calmly. "We must fight."

"I don't understand these rules," Leo says, anger and fear rising in him at just how fully in control of tonight's events Ue is. He had thought that they were creating this game together, but it seems more and more like Ue is in charge of the rules, just as he is in charge of everything else. "You said yourself, this is a duel to the death. How can it have a time limit?"

Ue crosses his arms. "The rules state that the combatants must have a chance to rest. Each round of battle can last only one night."

Leo's mind races. _If I can only keep him talking until sunrise... _

_No. This ends NOW. There is no round three._

He draws his katana. "I would not want to keep you waiting." He beckons with one swordtip. "Let's fight."

He settles into a defensive position, and prays that his plan, his last idea, will work. _Go all the way._ It's his only chance.

Ue draws his own sword. "This battle will bring me great glory," he says. "Let us make it a worthy combat." He too adopts a defensive pose. "I will grant you first strike."

Leo takes a deep breath and raises his sword.

Then he lowers it.

He kneels to the ground, placing his weapons on the floor before him.

"What?" Ue has straightened from his pose out of sheer surprise. "Leonardo, there is no surrender!"

"I am not a warrior," Leo says calmly, keeping his head lowered and his hands on his knees. "I do not live and think as a warrior. I do not fight for sport; I do not believe taking life ever brings honor. I will not fight you, Ue. If there is glory for you in killing an enemy who is not a warrior, an enemy who does not fight back, then -" He tucks his head further down, exposing his neck. "Kill me."

He waits.

There is no cold blow to the back of his neck. No clatter of a weapon dropped or soft hiss of a sword replaced in its sheath.

"You disappoint me, Leonardo."

"If I am unworthy," Leo says steadily, "then kill me."

"I cannot kill an enemy who kneels." Leo's heart leaps at Ue's words. "Stand, Leonardo."

_It's working. He can't kill you if you don't fight back._

"No."

"Stand, Leonardo!"

"No!"

Even as he repeats it, though, he feels his body rising. He is lifting, his legs unfolding beneath him, and as his head is forced up he sees Ue holding the staff aloft.

"I asked you," Ue says, softly, dangerously, "to stand."

Leo feels his dangling toes brush the floor, and then he is lowered slightly, so that his heels too are touching the ground. He imagines that, from the outside, this looks very much like standing. He wills himself to fall.

"Fight, Leonardo," Ue says, and in his peripheral vision Leo sees his swords rise to the level of his hands, and float there, waiting for him to seize them.

"You can control me all you want," Leo says, as calmly as he can, even as his heart freezes at the idea that even his own body is now under Ue's control. "I can't imagine there's any honor for you in fighting a _puppet_."

The skin around Ue's eyes contorts, and Leo pictures the rest of his masked face twisting as well. Then the hilts of his swords are thrust into his hands, and his fingers tighten painfully around the bindings.

"It is just as easy for me to kill you with magic," Ue says, "but you will find it easier to die by the sword. Magic is _slow_." He says the word with great relish, and as he does Leo feels the tearing, burning sensation invade him again.

It hurts. It hurts _everywhere_, and just as there is no place for him to hide in this chamber, there is no place to hide within his own consciousness. He can't escape the pain, can't take himself away from it. He can only endure, clinging to his plan and to his honor as tightly as he can, even as his fingers clench harder and the rough cloth cuts into his palms.

"Why, Leonardo?" Ue is asking him. "Why do you accept suffering? Do you hate life so much?"

Leo closes his eyes. There is only the blood in his hands, the pain, Ue's voice.

"I do not understand you, Leonardo. I know you are different from others in your world, but to have such a strange spirit… a spirit that chooses death…"

No. No. That isn't true. That's not why he…

"I choose life," Leo grits, and through the swell of pain he forces his voice to come out of his throat. "I choose life, Ue! I choose life for _both_ of us!"

"That is not a _choice!_" Ue shouts back at him. "That is _cowardice!_" The burning intensifies even further, then suddenly slackens, freeing the breath Leo hadn't even realized was trapped inside him. "Answer, Leonardo!"

"Then I – choose – cowardice," Leo pants. He swallows hard, an acid lozenge that burns all the way to his stomach. "Do you want to kill a coward, Ue?"

A long, long moment. The fire in his stomach, the blood in his hands.

And then, finally, the sound of metal on leather.

"You are not who I thought you were, Leonardo."

"I am who I am," he replies. He keeps his eyes closed. He had always vowed to die with his eyes open, but that is an act of bravery, and would betray him. He keeps his eyes closed in order to live.

He feels the magic release him, knows it by the sudden coldness in his limbs, by the way his feet rest more solidly on the floor.

Instantly he sinks to his knees, casts his swords away. "I cannot win a mortal challenge," he says. "End this, Ue. Kill me, or release me."

Ue advances, his footsteps loud in the silent room. Leo risks opening his eyes, knowing the other ninja is now so close he will not be able to see Leo's downturned expression. The toes of Ue's boots are within Leo's field of vision, and Leo waits for him to draw his blade again, and strike.

"You are not the foe I sought," Ue says. From his position on the floor, Leo realizes how tall the other ninja is, but still he does not move. "There is no honor for me here. I must continue my search." He steps back, giving Leo space. "I release you from this challenge."

Still Leo does not stand. If he does, if he shows any willingness at all to fight, the foreign warrior still might change his mind.

"I cannot bow to an enemy who kneels," Ue tells him.

"I cannot bow to an enemy who finds glory in killing," Leo replies.

"Very well." A bright glow begins to fill Leonardo's vision, starting at the top and spreading downwards. "The sun is rising, Leonardo. It is time to go home."

And then he is gone, and Leo is alone.

* * *

Don holds Mike in his arms, and waits. It seems to take a long time. He wonders whether anything will ever happen.

_If Leo loses... do we just stay here, forever?_

The portal disappeared as soon as Leo walked through it, and once again there is no way out of the domed chamber.

All they can do is wait, and hope.

Raph is pacing, the angry energy of his footfalls seeming to have already worn a groove in the stone floor. Mike is standing very still, his face buried in Don's neck, barely seeming to breathe.

Don just tries to keep it together, to be the balance between the brother who can't stay in one place, and the brother who can't move at all.

And then the room begins to glow.

Don turns his head. The wall is unbearably bright. He squints against it, trying to see what's coming.

Raph moves up beside him, protectively. Mike raises his head, also ready to defend himself.

Something dark moves within the light. A figure, coming towards them. It's blurry at first, indistinct, but gradually it becomes defined, until it is outlined sharply against the glow.

"Leo!"

Raph moves first, grabbing Leo up in a hug. "Did ya do it?" he asks. "What -"

"Yes," Leo says, returning the hug. There's something awkward in his grip, but Raph barely notices. "I went all the way, Raph."

Raph releases Leo, only to punch him lovingly in the shoulder. "Knew ya had it in ya."

Leo smiles wordlessly. Then he turns and reaches out to meet Don's approach, to embrace him, but Don stops short, looking at Leo's outstretched arms.

"Leo!" Don grabs one of Leo's wrists, then the other one. "Your hands!"

"I know," Leo says, "he –" He looks down, and his eyes widen. "What?"

His palms are glowing with a silvery light. He turns his hands curiously, rotating his arms in Don's loose grip, and the light moves with them. He curls his fingers, and the light fades, seeping into his palms, leaving only green skin.

"The hell was that?" Raph asks, grabbing Leo's arm away from Don so he can look closer.

Leo pulls back, until Raph lets go, and looks at his own hands. Then he looks up, his gaze resting on the bo behind Don's shoulder. "Donnie, you got your bo back."

Don reaches up to touch his weapon, and confusion furrows his brow. "Yes…?"

"How?" Leo asks.

"When Ue grabbed the staff," Don says, "everything sort of… wobbled. Then we were in the observance bubble, and –" he gestures to the paired sai in Raph's belt "- everyone had their own weapons again." He tilts his head. "Didn't you notice, earlier?"

"I wasn't really paying attention," Leo says. "He… he reset everything, didn't he? He sent us back to the beginning of the battle, so we could fight again." He holds up his hands. "He's doing it again."

"What?" Don says. "Leo, what happened in there?"

Leo turns his hands around, looking at his palms. "My hands got scraped up. When he tried to make me fight."

"What?" Raph's brow furrows. "When he tried to – didn't you kill him?"

"_No_," Leo says, seeming hurt at how Raph had misunderstood him. "I didn't fight him at all."

"Yeah, and now look." Raph points accusingly to Leo's hands. "He's resetting again. How long're you gonna keep doin' this, Leo?"

Leo shakes his head. "No. It's over. I surrendered."

Raph throws up his hands, and paces away.

"Then… isn't he going to come back?" Mike asks, in a small voice.

Leo glances again at his uninjured hands, then reaches forward to draw Mike into an embrace. "No," he says, finally feeling like he might understand the rules. "He's not resetting so he can try again. He's resetting because the challenge can't be left half-finished."

"So… it's over?" Mike asks.

"Yes." Leo tightens his grip momentarily, then lets go. "I finally got through to him. I'm not the person he wants to fight." He looks at each of them. "He doesn't understand our kind of honor. He thinks I'm a coward, because I wouldn't kill him." He smiles. "I let him believe it, because it was the only way we would both walk out of there. But I hope that someday he'll learn what we know: that it takes much more courage to let your enemy _live_." He moves forward, between his brothers, towards the center of the room. "Let's go home, guys."

"Uh," Raph says. "Love to, bro, but... how?"

Leo looks to the ceiling. "Just wait."

Even as they watch, the white light emanating from the domed ceiling turns silver, and then the very stone begins to drip down and flow away, like paint bleeding off a wall.

And they're standing in familiar sewers.

The tunnel is low, dim, wet from the weekend's rain. It has the same undifferentiated bricks and pipes as any other tunnel.

Don groans. "Not _again_…" He rotates slowly, looking for identifying features, trying to get his bearings. "Where are we _now?_"

Leo only points to the storm drain in front of them. Pale light is streaming through the narrow opening. "Look."

Mike moves forward, rising on his toes to peer out at the world above. "Wow," he whispers.

The others come up to stand beside him, and they watch the white stone of City Hall gradually turn pink, as the sun rises over the edge of the world.

"But..." Don says, "how can it be so early? It felt like so much longer…" He frowns. "Is - is it _Tuesday?_"

"I don't think so," Leo says. "Everything is being undone." He looks at his unbloodied palms. "It's a new day." He lowers his hands, and turns to his brothers. "It's later than we should have gotten home, though. Master Splinter will be waiting." He glances once more at the sunrise, then moves away from the drain. "Come on."

And they follow him, to the lower tunnels, to their own front door.

* * *

There's one more brick wall.

Raph can't help glaring at it, even as Don reaches into the hidden panel that conceals the unlocking mechanism, and flicks the switch that makes the two parts of the wall move smoothly apart.

The way opens, and they go in.

"My sons!" Splinter hurries to meet them as they enter, touching each of them, making sure they are safe. "I had thought you would be home hours ago. Your phones did not seem to be working..."

"Master Splinter." Leo bends to embrace his father. "We're all right. And have we got a story for you..."


End file.
